Pioneers in Science and Technology Series: Robert Seamans

PIONEERS IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY SERIES
ORAL HISTORY OF DR. ROBERT SEAMANS
Interviewed by Clarence Larson
Filmed by Jane Larson
Date Unknown
Transcribed by Jordan Reed
MR. LARSON: …Seamans and our series of video tapes, “Pioneers in Science and Technology.” Dr. Seamans received his higher education at Harvard and MIT and following this he has had a distinguished career in the aerospace research and development. He was Deputy Administrator of NASA, Secretary of the Air Force, President of the National Academy of Engineering, Founder and Administrator of the Energy Research and Development Agency, Dean of the School of Engineering at MIT, and Distinguished Professor of Environment and Public Policy. He has served on the Board of Directors of many private and public corporations and he has been awarded the Cabot Medal, the Distinguished Service Award of NASA, the Distinguished Public Service Medal, and the Sperry Award just to mention a few. It gives me great pleasure to present Dr. Robert Seamans. Please precede, Dr. Seamans.
DR. SEAMANS: Well, I’m very happy to have this chance to sit here and chat with you and your wife and going back to the beginning when I became aware of things like math and physics and so on. I was at a small school in Lenox, Massachusetts, an Episcopal school. We had mass, there was a minister, but it was like he was also very interested in science and technology, which is sort of an amazing combination. He encouraged several of us in high school who showed a propensity for, showed an interested in math and physics and carried us perhaps somewhat further than some would normally go in high school.
MR. LARSON: Just to perhaps to orient ourselves as a period of time, what were the years that you perhaps spent in high school and grade school.
DR. SEAMANS: Well, I started high school in ’33, graduated from high school in 1936.
MR. LARSON: Oh, yes.
DR. SEAMANS: And I had very little in the way of concept of what I might want to eventually do. I thought of going to the University of Wisconsin, I think partly because I would be further away from home and most of my relatives had been. When it finally came down to the wire, I did the check in at Harvard and I was accepted at Harvard where my father had been and my uncle had gone, and so on. I started in college, I took the normal courses and I went out and tried to play football, hockey and baseball. I wasn’t terribly good at it. I got beaten up on the line of scrimmage quite a few times but I did find that there were some courses that I liked a lot better than others at Harvard. These courses again were in mathematics and physics. It was then at Harvard, an undergraduate program called Engineering Sciences. I found that by getting involved in that particular line of endeavor I didn’t have to take what were called divisional examinations. I didn’t have to have a tutor. It was a little bit less disciplined than some of the other series of courses.
MR. LARSON: Do you remember any of your college professors at that time?
DR. SEAMANS: Yes. Professor Hartline was my, he was a civil engineer and also a classmate of my fathers. I first got to know him between freshman and sophomore year. I decided there was no point in hanging around all summer so I went up to the Harvard Civilian Camp up at Squam Lake and learned how to level up a transit and go out there and tape through the underbrush, make maps and contour lines and put in railroads on paper and all that sort of thing and I found I really enjoyed it.
MR. LARSON: The usual engineering, starting engineering curricula.
DR. SEAMANS: That’s exactly what it was. I found that by a fluke, at the end of the summer I had the equivalent of about a year and a half’s work at Harvard. There was a required English course for all freshmen, unless you got over a certain grade at Harvard in your college boards and I got over that grade, even though I wasn’t suppose to be very good in English. I had a cousin exactly my age who was terribly good in English, and he had to take the required course and I didn’t and the family was absolutely positive that the exams got crossed up when they were graded.
MR. LARSON: That’s a very amusing incident.
DR. SEAMANS: Yeah, but in any event I decided to try to go through college in three years, and I did. I actually graduated in 1939. I was of the class of 1940. And I guess I was lucky that it worked out that way part way through my junior year, which was my last year of studies, I developed a shortness of breath and I found I couldn’t exercise and so on. It turned out I had rheumatic fever.
MR. LARSON: Oh my.
DR. SEAMANS: What would have been normally my senior year in college, I was in bed for three months and wasn’t allowed to get out of bed but for 5 minutes the first day, 10 the second, and so on, until the summer after I would have graduated in 1940. I was back living a pretty normal existence, but I felt that that three months in bed and another six months to get reconstituted, while I wouldn’t wish it on anybody, it was really a very valuable experience. I had a chance to really think a great deal about what I wanted to do and I also had the benefit of a very large number of people who were very thoughtful, who came in to see me, one-on-one conversations with people and I got to know people much better than you do in sort of casual conversation like you would on the street or at a large party or something of that sort.
MR. LARSON: Well, that’s wonderful that you had that opportunity. I suppose you also had a chance to do quite a bit of reading.
DR. SEAMANS: I did a lot of reading and as a result of that, I thought instead of following the engineering line, maybe some form of medicine might be more challenging and so on. So the summer after I was back on my feet, I went back to Harvard. I had my degree, but I went back there and I took premed courses that summer. At that point, I became rather uncertain as to what I might do. I found that I wasn’t particularly enamored of cutting into animals and various things. Some of the engineering I had done seemed a little more attractive. You asked me what faculty were there at Harvard at that time. [Jacob Pieter] Den Hartog, who eventually went to MIT, was then teaching mechanical engineering, and he was a most stimulating person at Harvard. Then a fellow named William Bolle taught aerodynamics. I as a junior helped calibrate a wind tunnel that he was building there in the musty old building that we used for engineering. So I waited as I drove into Cambridge as to which way I ought to go. The engineering made more sense. So I actually enrolled in Harvard at the Engineering, School of Engineering. After the second day, a friend of mine said, “You know, I’m not actually certain that we are getting the best possible education here at Harvard in Engineering.” He said, “We might do better if we were doing graduate work at MIT.” He said, “I’m going over there this afternoon. Would you care to come along with me?” I didn’t know anything about MIT really at that time, but I said, “Sure.” I would be glad to go with him and keep him company. The first place we went was logically the admissions office and Dean Thresher had a few moments to spare and my friend explained what he had in mind and Dean Thresher was very thoughtful and asked me what I had done in college, although I wasn’t really interested in transferring, but I told him. He said, “You two boys apparently have done quite good work at Harvard and you have taken some courses that will give you some credit here at MIT. I think we can start you both off here as sophomores.” At that point, we both stood up and thanked him very much and headed for the door, not at all interested in being undergraduates again, when he said, “Possibly you could get more credits if you go around to each department at MIT. If you filled out this form here which will show what courses you took at Harvard, what the textbooks were, the subject matter, and so on. Just go around to each department at MIT and just see what they would give you in equivalent courses.” Well, my friend was absolutely disgusted with this and we got out to the car and said he was going back to Harvard. Now, I can’t tell you why, but I was just intrigued with the idea of listing all the courses I had taken and not only as an undergraduate, but also in high school and going around and bargaining with everybody at MIT in these various departments. I was doing quite well. I found pretty soon I was up to a junior year and maybe a senior year. I ended up in aeronautical engineering with a person named R.H. Smith. Dr. [Jerome Clarke] Hunsaker was then the head of the department, but this was 1940, and he was already very busy in Washington. He had been in the Navy and he also was involved with the NACA, the National Advisory Committee in Aeronautics. R.H. Smith was the sort of acting head of the department. He said, “I just don’t understand why you want to come over here and be an undergraduate when you have your bachelor’s degree.” I said, “Well, of course I don’t want to do that, but Dean Thresher said I didn’t have enough credit to come to MIT as a graduate student.” He said, “Well, that’s ridiculous.” He looked at what I had done and he said, “I’ll call him right now.” They had quite an argument over the phone. I could tell what the conversation, how it was going and I was able to interject a few things. I had had this and that and the other thing that Thresher said I hadn’t had. Then R.H. Smith said, “Well, it’s settled. You come over here now as a graduate student in aeronautical engineering.”
MR. LARSON: You made a lot of progress. (Laughter) From being a sophomore undergraduate to a graduate student.
DR. SEAMANS: This was in 48 hours. I thought it was great fun. Then he turned to me and he said, “Do you know how long it is going to take to get a master’s of science degree in aeronautical engineering?” I said, “I really don’t.” He said, “Well, you do have a fair number of deficiencies in aeronautical engineering.” He said, “I think it will probably take you about three years.” I said, “That’s quite a while isn’t it.” And he said, “Unless you want to concentrate in instrumentation.” I said, “Well, how long would that take?” He said, “Well, I don’t really know.” “And what exactly is it?” He said, “I’m not exactly sure.” He said, “There is a Dr. [Charles Stark] Draper who is responsible for instrumentation here. Why don’t you go around and see him and he can tell you about it.”
MR. LARSON: Well, that’s a fabulous story to be able to get connected up with Dr. Draper in that way.
DR. SEAMANS: So I went around to see Dr. Draper and he said, “Well, the best way for you to find out is to take my course. It’s starting next Monday and see what you make of it.” I said, “How long will it take?” He said, “To get a degree, that’s going to be up to you.” He said, “I don’t think it would take three years if you really get going and work hard. Take a reasonable number of courses each term.” So the next Monday I was there all registered at MIT, much to the amazement of my parents who thought I might be doing something a little bit peculiar to resign from Harvard and go to MIT.
MR. LARSON: Very unorthodox behavior to say the least.
DR. SEAMANS: Yes. So, I went in this classroom in Building 33 there, the Guggenheim Laboratory, so called and I noticed that Dr. Draper didn’t have on a coat. He had on a green eye shade and the classroom was just absolutely full of students. People were standing up in the back of the room. He came in and he said, “I know there are some of you that don’t really know what you want to do and you’re not sure whether you want to be engineers or not.” He said, “I’ll tell you if you want to be engineers don’t expect to be able to buy a lot of horses or buy mink coats for your wives, that sort of thing,” but he said, “I’ll guarantee you’ll have a lot of fun.” That was sort of the spirit of the course. It was a lot of fun. I did stay working with him for 15 years.
MR. LARSON: I didn’t realize that ‘cause Dr. Draper is known for his tremendous research contributions. I had no idea he was such an outstanding teacher also.
DR. SEAMANS: Well he was a remarkable teacher because he involved us really in the work he was doing. He would come into the classroom and actually discuss the kind of thing he had been doing over the weekend and the examples that we had to work on for the course were not examples or questions or problems that had been handed out over the years. They were new problems that were brand new and right up to date, and that’s what made it exciting. Everybody who took his courses were stimulated by him and the people he gathered around him, Waldo McKay and some other faculty there. So It turned out two semesters later, that is by the following, I guess it was July 1941, I finished all the course work that was required for my master’s degree and only lacked the thesis to get my master’s of science degree and so I went around to see Doc, as he was called, students included, and I said, “Doc, I need a thesis to get my degree. Do you have any suggestions?” He said, “Well, we have a program with the Sperry Telescope Company that makes some vibration measuring equipment and if you cared to work on some aspect of that,” he said, “I think we could pay you a stipend as you work on your thesis.” I thought, “My goodness, imagine getting paid to go to college. That would be great.” And so I started in August, the summer of ’41. My boss was an instructor by the name of [Homer] Oldfield, nicknamed Barney for the racetrack driver. And I was a research assistant. It wasn’t very long after that Barney Oldfield, turns out was in the Army Reserve and he was called to active duty. Dr. Draper called me into his office and said, asked me if I would like to be an instructor that fall. I said, “Well that would be just fine.” I was a little apprehensive about being an instructor, but I figured, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”
MR. LARSON: Yes. Being an instructor at MIT is sort of a deplorable undertaking.
DR. SEAMANS: Yes, and that turned out to be a very valuable experience. So I was able, all during the war, I was there at MIT working in part as an instructor, and then three years after that becoming an assistant professor and I was also doing research in the instrumentation lab with Doc Draper, in part on conventional aircraft instruments and in part on fire control for the Navy, anti-aircraft fire control, as well as fire control for the Air Force for gun firing equipment for fighters as well as a bomb site. So, I ended up…
[Break in Audio]
DR. SEAMANS: …you know working a seven day a week proposition there. I had, there were Navy students coming through, I guess it was the V-12 program. They would come in as I think lieutenants and they would be at MIT for three months. They would split into two groups and each group took a course in instrumentation for six weeks and then the other group would come in for six. I taught that course I think 14 times and there was never a gap other than a weekend between each group, just going right around the clock, and of course at the beginning there were many of the Navy coming through that were considerable older than I was and with some of them coming from the well-known instrument companies. It wasn’t long before they figured out that they knew more than I did. So they would try to bait me. I found a pretty good technique to deal with them. I would find out who they were and where they were from and then I would say to the class, “We are very fortunate to have John Smith from the Bendix Corporation,” and I would invite them to give one of the lectures. I found that usually shut them up pretty rapidly. They didn’t like the idea of having to come front and center, and having to do any work.
MR. LARSON: Yes, that was a very good technique.
DR. SEAMANS: So, that was the sort of the war experience. I remember on the 24th of December, Doc coming in and saying, “I don’t think we need to come in and work tomorrow being Christmas Day.” It was an amazingly intense period of time with both the academic side of it as well as the research and development side tied in primarily with the Navy and the Air Force.
MR. LARSON: Yes, of course, MIT had so many important active programs in the defense effort. So there must have been a real hot bed of activity in all the fields there at MIT.
DR. SEAMANS: Of course, the radiation lab was there, which Lee DuBridge was the director of and ran so effectively, and Gordon Brown in electrical engineering had a serial mechanism lab. When the war was over, the question of what to do and so on. The research side of things we realized that one of the problems that we had with the fire control with aircraft was the airplane itself, that the computers and sights and so on were better than, or more capable with coming up with the right answer than the pilot was in flying the airplane. So we suggested to the Air Force that there should be a project where we would actually measure the performance of an airplane in flight and then run some tests with some fire control equipment to see how, where in the largest errors occurred. Did they occur in the inertia of the airplane, or the control surface of the airplane, or the pilot’s inability to follow the information from the sight, or was it actually in the computer itself. So this was called the Tracking Control Project. This was the first project that I established. I figured out that this would be a good thing to do and I got the project sold and got it funded and I ran it for about three years’ time. It was a very exciting project. I might just interject one thing though before going back, thinking of the war, one of the projects that we had was for automatic gun laying for a director system that was going to be used to shoot down kamikazes. This meant that we had to track with radar because the kamikazes were all coming in with the sun behind them. So you couldn’t look up and see the plane coming, so you had to track it with radar. You had to have the sight and so on. The problem, the equipment was built and then it was found it was very difficult to acquire the target in the first place. Doc Draper came up with the idea of how this could be done and he gave me the job of rounding up the equipment and taking it down. The first installation was on a ship called the Bon Homme Richard, which was one of our aircraft carriers, one of the larger ones. So with great zeal, I got the servo drives and the various things that were going to be required to, for the target acquisition system. I put it in the back of a Hertz car and drove down to Bayonne, New Jersey, where the ship was tied out. It took me about 24 hours to get through the gate and then when I got to the ship, they wouldn’t allow me on the ship. When I finally got on the ship, the gunnery officer said, “Nobody, but nobody was going to touch any of the equipment on the ship.” Suddenly, I can see not somebody, a very young man from MIT. They had all the green checks you see, where everything was tagged and was ready to go to sea.
MR. LARSON: A few obstacles in your way there.
DR. SEAMANS: So I got a hold of Doc Draper on a pay phone while standing out on the dock. He in turn called somebody in Washington and later on in the day, Admiral Mortel from the Bureau of Ordinance arrived and explained to the gunnery officer this equipment was going on the ship. But by the time I started to work on it, the ship was about to sail. So a lot of the work, there were three of these installations to make, were while we went out for the ships first trial at sea. This is in the middle of winter, out of Bayonne, New Jersey. They found a place where I could sleep which happened to be right by the place where the elevators go up and down all night long with all the airplanes on them. I found that I had to tie into one cable that was down in the keel of the ship and another set of cables were up in the skipper’s sea quarters up on top of the bridge and I was tearing around with these wiring diagrams trying to figure out where all these wires were so I could interconnect them. I also found there were Western Electric people on board who had responsibility for the radar. In a few cases, I would make some connections, I had to, to their equipment, but when I’d come back two hours later, I’d find they disconnected the wiring I had already put in there. They didn’t like anybody meddling with their equipment. Anyways, after about a week, the equipment seemed to be working and they actually had trials at sea, where the plane came over telling a target and they fired away and everything to work all right. I was put ashore off the coast of Norfolk. I had to go down the side of the ship with a robe ladder, holding my oscilliscope that I had taken out of the laboratory at MIT and jumped into a launch and took me to shore and there was a message for me to call Dr. Draper as soon as I arrived ashore. His deep concern was I had taken an Avis car and the Avis Company was very distraught that they couldn’t find me or the car and where the keys to the car so they could send a driver down to take the car back to Boston. He was very pleased the equipment worked. I had to wind my way back to Boston by train from Richmond, sitting between cars on bags, all the trains were so terribly crowded. I arrived back in Boston with a word that the next morning I was to go out on a destroyer and I was to put similar equipment aboard this destroyer. But it was very gratifying in that these ships after they got this equipment were out in the Pacific and were able to shoot down some of the kamikazes at least.
MR. LARSON: Yes, I believe that that equipment plus the development of the proximity fuse and a few other things really almost turned the tide on aircraft defense.
DR. SEAMANS: But I had a very small role in all that but going back to the Tracking Control Project. Here was a project where for the first time, I had conceived something that needed to be done and was able to assemble a team that turned out to be about 35 people we had working. One of the aspects of the project was that in those days it was multi-disciplinary. The term is used a great deal today to include everything from environmental engineering to social science. But in those days you found very seldom you even had a project where electrical engineers and aeronautical engineers worked together. We had to do that in this project. We had to try to simulate how the airplane might respond and there weren’t simulators then we actually had to build an analog computer as a part of the project so we could try to anticipate how the airplane would respond. We had to test the airplane. We found that there just wasn’t data available that would tell us how an airplane would respond to controls dynamically. I found there was work being done at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory in Buffalo where they were actually oscillating the controls and measuring the response of the airplane. We installed the equipment on an A-26 aircraft so that we could oscillate first the elevator, then the rudder, then the airlines at different speeds and so on so we could see what happened. It was a pretty laborious process needless to say. Then we experimented with more of a pulse where you would have two stops on the control column and have the pilot, just as fast as he could just do this and do that and measure the response and it turned out you got the same data that way and you, it didn’t take as long to get the information. We did the same thing with the autopilot, put in dynamic signals and measure the response and with the radar so that when we were with our computer able to simulate it and it seemed to be stable. Then very cautiously we started tying the whole system together and flying it and those were really exciting days.
MR. LARSON: Yes, well it was of course, the year before, pilots flew by the seat of their pants so to speak. Now you’re getting into the controls which increase the effectiveness fantastically.
DR. SEAMANS: One of the, this is work that was did with Wright Field. There was a colonel in charge of the armament lab out there named Lee Davis. He became a general in the Air Force, but he was overall, responsible for this project along with a lot of other projects and this was at the same time that the first jet bombers were being built out at the Boeing Company. They found when they first flew, this was a B-47, and that if the pilot wasn’t careful, the airplane would go into quite a violent oscillation, lateral oscillation. They decided that the thing to do was to put a servo mechanism in there that would drive the router that would cause the airplane to fly straight, but they weren’t allowed to connect it without Air Force approval. This was a very wild thought in those days. You might not have the pilot do the whole job, you see. I got a call from Colonel Davis and he said he was going out to Seattle and he would like me to join him out there to review the possibility of putting in these dynamic controls in the B-47. We arrived out there and met with the Boeing people and they said that they wanted to connect the servo and Colonel Davis said well where is the information on the airplane as to how it is going to respond dynamically. The same kind of information we had been getting on our airplane. They said that they didn’t have it right there with them. he said well where is it. It was over in another building in another part of Seattle. He said well go and get it. They said it would take quite a while. We said we would sit here and wait, you just go get it. Well it turned out that they didn’t have the data and so the decision that we made wasn’t very astute. We said why didn’t they try it but turn it on very gradually so that if anything catastrophic was going to happen, if they turned it on very slowly, they would be able to turn it off. It did work and hence forth all of the 47’s and then the B-52’s, and the B-36’s all had automatic equipment that helped stabilize them. Of course today, there are actually airplanes that are flying for the Air Force where there is not even a cable that goes from the control column back to the control surface. It is all done automatically by wire. But that was furthest from our thoughts back in those days. When this project, this so called tracking control project did lead us into quite a few interesting problems. One was on the B-36, which was probably the largest plane the Air Force ever built. It was a mammoth thing, it had six propellers and it also had, as I remember it, four jet engines on it. So it actually had 10 engines. It was so large that to go from one end to the other you had a tube that you got on and you’d line your back and the thing would travel on a track from one end of the plane to the other. It would sort of be shot from one end to the other. And the concern with that plane was it was so big that it was a question of where you put the instruments because the front end of the plane wasn’t necessarily wiggling the same as the rear end of the plane. So we got into that problem in connection with our project. How do you take into account the fact that these airplanes are big and floppy and not just absolutely ridged like a fighter airplane? Anyway, sort of out of that experience, we dually submitted our information and wrote our reports and that was sort of the end of that project. I was asked if I would become what was called the systems engineer on a media project at MIT. The media project was started by the Navy, the Bureau of Ordinance right after World War II to see what could be done educationally primarily at places like MIT and Johns Hopkins and so on to introduce missile experience into the aeronautical and electrical curricula to be based on the experience of Germany where they had the V-1’s and the V-2’s and we really didn’t have anything that was quite equivalent to that in our country. There was hope that there was research that would go along with the academic work that would actually move the science and engineering ahead. The program started at MIT at about 6 or 7 different departments. Guy Stever was very actively involved with it at the start and it was a program in electrical engineering, for example. Jerry [Jerome] Wiesner was involved with certain kinds of radar, but as time went on the Navy seemed to become less interested in the work in different disciplinary areas. They said in effect, “Where’s the missile? Not where’s the beef? Where’s the missile?” (Laughter)
MR. LARSON: This was in such an early stage in the development of missiles.
DR. SEAMANS: And really when MIT got into it, they really hadn’t expected to, that they were going to have to deliver a missile. For the time I was asked to join it, they wanted a missile and they wanted MIT to come up with sort of the concept and technology and Bel-Aircraft Company was going to build the missile. So I ended up learning a great deal, frankly, about organization. I found that to get 7 different departments at MIT with a lot of faculty involved all working together on a single project was a little more than I ever encountered before.
MR. LARSON: Sometimes getting two departments to work together is a tremendous task.
DR. SEAMANS: Right. The method that seemed to be necessary was called a central group that would in addition to the departmental efforts, a central engineering group that would have overall responsibility, it was an agonizing problem I found to get the space, the location, everybody’s agreement that the money would be spent on the central group and not be distributed around to all the departments. As I say, it was an exercise that I found very helpful in years that were to follow in places like NASA and the Air Force. The problems were very similar, but on a much larger scale. We didn’t proceed, I guess quite rapidly enough because after, we did actually build a developmental missile. We did get it out of Point McGoo on the west coast. It was on the slung underneath what was called an F3D aircraft. We trained the pilots to fly it. We went out on a range and try shooting at a drone target. The technology had gone beyond towing sleeves and you had remotely controlled drones that you could fire at. But there was great impatience in Washington. We weren’t moving more rapidly and so on. I can remember one day when I got a call from a person named Bob Briggs who was in charge of a project out there. He said, “It’s gone,” and I said, “What do you mean ‘it’s gone’?” He said, “I mean the missile is gone.” I said, “Well, it can’t be.” He said, “It is.” He said, “We were flying around on this course,” which was like a race course, where you went around and the target would be out over the ocean and as the F3D came around the corner it would go out after the drone and then fire the missile. That was the idea. But when going around the corner, neither the pilot nor the R-engineer who’s on the right hand side were looking, the missile dropped off the airplane. This is one of life’s darkest moments. I said, “Do you know approximately when it came off?” And they knew approximately. They were just going out with the Navy to see if they could find it. I said, “Well, what kind of terrain is down there?” They said, “Well, its farm land.”
MR. LARSON: Oh my goodness.
DR. SEAMANS: It actually turned out to be a very large bean field, you see. And lo and behold they did find the spot where the missile had hit the ground and had gone underground about 15 feet in this bean field and they had to get out there and dig a great big hole and of course everybody in the vicinity was terribly interested and they had to quarter it off and pull this thing out and take it back to our laboratory.
MR. LARSON: That’s amazing they were able to find it, almost like a needle in a hay stack.
DR. SEAMANS: So then of course they had to say something to the public at large. So they wrote this story, heroic story about this Marine pilot in the airplane who realized he had to jettison this missile and so he carefully selected this bean field where he could drop it.
MR. LARSON: Very good public relations.
DR. SEAMANS: That’s right. We did have one more missile and we were able to fire it. It did work well enough that we got some good information, but we decided to disconnect, discontinue this project.
MR. LARSON: What year was that?
DR. SEAMANS: This was in 1950, summer of 1953.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. SEAMANS: So when it was discontinued, there was the question of what would happen with this group that I had accumulated as sort of the system engineering group. It was converted over into what was called the Flight Control Laboratory and I became its director. We ended up with a number of projects. One of them was a hydro-foil boat that Gibson Cox was working on. They didn’t know how to control it to keep it so it would be stable when it went up on the foils. So we were able to salvage some of the equipment from our media project and put it on the ship and we had a very interesting time over that two year period. We got to the point where you could fly this hydro-foil boat, just like an airplane, make bank turns and so forth with it. We had a variety of other projects, but there came a time when I got a call from RCA and they were interested in having me consider coming and working for them in a systems laboratory that they were going to start in Camden, New Jersey. Would I come down and visit them there? Well, I came down to Camden, New Jersey, and wasn’t enchanted with the environment there and advised them that, no, I wasn’t really interested in leaving Cambridge. Actually, there was a family reason for not leaving as well. We have one son who is very hard of hearing and he as doing very well with a special educational program and we felt that if we moved to New Jersey or Washington or what have you, that it would be very difficult for him. So I advised them that I wouldn’t accept. So anyways, about a week later they said, “Well, would you be willing to start a laboratory for RCA in the Boston area?” Well, that was very, very interesting and challenging.
MR. LARSON: And I would say very complimentary. There are several instances in history where corporations have wooed institutions to suit the needs of the chief investigator. So you would join a very unique group there.
DR. SEAMANS: It turned out that MIT at that time was getting quite concerned that the tail might be wagging the dog in that there was too much research going on for the amount of education and I knew they were, Dr. Killian and Straten, Jay Straten had this concern. So it seemed as though maybe making the move and possibly being able to hire some of the people in the Flight Control Laboratory would work out well. And that is what happened. The Flight Control Laboratory came to an end and maybe 50 per cent of the people who worked in it, of course each individual, it was a free choice. And that is how we were able to get off to a pretty fast start in the old Waltham Watch Building out near route 128.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. SEAMANS: And I was introduced then to another kind of organization, namely a large corporation with quite a few levels of organization would tend to move in and tell us how to improve our operation.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. Those most have been some of the early days of route 128, the developing of route 128.
DR. SEAMANS: After about a, there were some wonderful people at RCA. Elmer Engstrom was one. And he was at the corporate level and he was a tremendous help when certain problems came along. One of them was after a while the Waltham Watch Building was seen not to be the ultimate answer. Other people had moved into other parts of it and it was a sort of dreary building to put it mildly. And RCA decided then it was going to be sort of advantageous then to have a sort of engineering laboratory there in the Boston Area. We were able to collect some very good people and so on. So they decided that they would, that it would become more permanent, which meant finding some land and putting up a building. We made a map of where everybody lived and at that time I was living down in Beverly and of course I would have liked to have the lab in Beverly, but I knew I’d lose about 50 per cent of the people if I moved it that far. I edged it as far as possible in the direction of Beverly along 128 which turned out to be Burlington, Mass[achusetts], where there turned out to be very, very few laboratories, and very, very few manufacturing operations at that time. If you go there now, you’ll find clustered around where RCA finally put their building maybe 40 or 50 other companies that are located in that area. It’s kind of amazing.
MR. LARSON: Fantastic growth there.
DR. SEAMANS: But anyway, the question was: what kind of a building would we have there? I wanted a multi-storied building and so on. They said, “No, we’re not really sure you’re going to succeed so we want to have it a one story building and the clearance throughout, if we find you’re not going to succeed, we want to be able to convert it to a warehouse.” So I think it was 12 foot clearance throughout in the event that we have to give up the lab and go to a warehouse. I said, “Ok, I’ll go with that, but let’s make it in the shape of an H so that you don’t have to walk too far to get from one part of the building to another.” They said, “That would be fine.” When I went to look at the design, this was at corporate headquarters in New York, I found that the building was absolutely square and had no windows. I said, “We agreed it was going to be H shaped.” They said, “Well, it is we just took the ends and folded them in.” So it turned out to be a square. That’s when I went to Elmer Engstrom and I said, “Look, there is no way I can hire good, competent, technical people to work in a block house with no windows,” and he stepped in at the corporate level and he was senior Vice President so we got the building we wanted. One of the projects that we became involved in had to do with space. RCA started in ’55 and in ’57, [Yuri] Gagarin went into orbit and soon after that NASA was formed and there was a lot of concern in the Department of Defense about satellites going over head and the thought that we should at the very least be able to go up and inspect what was there and possibly even to intercept. And right out of the Secretary of Defense’s office we obtained a project, SD-10 as I remember it, Secretary of Defense 10, and it was called the SAINT project, Satellite Interceptor. That was the first time I had to really had to consume myself with orbital parameters and so on, but it really was the same technology that we started off on back in the days of fighter airplanes and then the missiles and now the satellites, maneuvers and so on, really weren’t that different, mathematically speaking, and even some of the technology was very similar. The only difference was one of the, the largest difference was when you got in space, you had to have control surfaces, you had to have little jets to drive you where you wanted to go.
MR. LARSON: Yeah, the driving mechanism and the control mechanism are quite different.
DR. SEAMANS: Right. We still had the problem of orienting the vehicle the right way, so that when you fired the jets you’d go in the direction you wanted. Well, I’d known Cortland Perkins for quite a period of time. He and I first were sort of shoulder to shoulder when we were working on our master’s theses back in the basement of Building 33 at MIT. I like to point out it was right where they took all the trash out and on the street every night. That is where we were located. By this time, this is 1959, he was assistant Secretary of the Air Force. At that time there was a laboratory in Holland that was set up to do electronic research for NATO. There was a laboratory right near the Hague and there had always been a US director. The director who was there was about to retire and he asked me if I would be interested in going over there and being the director. So after chatting with him about it and finding out about it, I went home to my wife, Jean, and we figured by then our son Toby was far enough along, he was actually at a boarding school and that probably doing something quite different was in order. It was sort of interesting to be over there in Holland for three years. The work appeared to be in line with the kind of thing I had been doing and I felt that I could handle it. So we agreed we’d do it. Well, just about the time my name was going to be submitted, the U2 was shot down over the Soviet Union. Khrushchev came to this country and this was the time when he was pounding the podium at the UN with his shoe and so on.
MR. LARSON: A very historic moment there.
DR. SEAMANS: Oh, yes. And some of the NATO countries would sort of applaud that the United States on their own, without telling them, had decided to put up a U2 and go over and get those pictures and so on. They decided then that instead of having a US director for one of their laboratories, it might be a good idea to have a European.
MR. LARSON: Oh, yes.
DR. SEAMANS: So anyways, I did not get the job.
MR. LARSON: The U2 incident changed your career somewhat then.
DR. SEAMANS: Maybe they were just being polite to me; maybe there were other reasons why I didn’t get it. But I was sitting in my office in June, this is now the June of 1960, when I got a call from Keith Lennon who was the administrator of NASA and I had never met him, but of course I had followed NASA and I was very interested in what was going on in the space area, and I as I mentioned earlier, we had one project at RCA and I guess I should of also mentioned I had been on the NACA Committee for Stability and Control ever since 1948 and had been one of those that argued strenuously that you didn’t have to stabilize airplanes just by using the air particles going by outside, that you could do something internal that would be helpful. Then when NASA was formed they set up some special advisory committees at the Hague to advise a new organization as NACA was transformed into NASA, what might be done in the space area in the controls and so on. I knew some of the people in NASA at the time, including Hub Drabner, whom I respected very much. So anyway I got the call from Keith Lennon, and he said, “Dr. Seamans, this is Keith Lennon and I just wondered if you were going to be down here in Washington anytime soon?” I gave him a truthful answer and I started by saying, “No, I wasn’t planning to.” But I was about to say, “But I would be happy to come down if you want to see me.” When he, he was a very direct person, you probably knew him actually.
MR. LARSON: Oh, yes. I knew him as a commissioner back in ’52.
DR. SEAMANS: He went to Yale and I kidded him that he reminded me of an old bulldog. But anyway he said, “Would you have dinner with me at the old Statler?” I said, “Of course.” So I arrive at the Statler and we went in and I had an Old Fashioned, had dinner and he just pulled out an organization chart right out of his pocket and without further ado. He said, “I’ve discussed this with Hub Drabner and we want you to come down and be the associate administrator of NASA.” He said, “You probably don’t know what that means, so here is this chart and your job is right there,” and he put his thumb down right on the chart and he said, “This is the job that Dick Horner now has and Dick is leaving. He agreed to take the job for one year, but now he wants to go back in the private life. So we would like you to come down and be what I would call a General Manager for NASA.” So we discussed it, of course I chewed it over with a lot of adrenaline pumping all the way home and discussed it with Jean and we finally decided it would be a pretty darn exciting thing to do. So almost before I knew it, I was down there on September 1, being sworn in by Keith as the Associate Administrator. Then came the process, of course thanks to Keith, of spending a whole month going around and visiting each one of the laboratories, which included not only the old NACA labs and centers, but also Wernher Von Braun’s Huntsville Operations and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Goddard lab which grew out of a naval research lab. Sometime after that, I guess it was probably in about October; we had a retreat down in Williamsburg with about 70 of the senior NASA people. He said, “I think it would be good if you just stood up and for about a half an hour gave everybody at this retreat, well call it impressions of a new Associate administrator.” I really agonized over this, what’s important, what have I seen in these five or six weeks that might be significant, what might be helpful, but just for fun to begin with, I said, “You know, one of the things that has really struck me about NASA is it’s formality.” I said, “You all know I use to be at RCA and there we made a fetish of calling people by first name or nicknames.” I said, “There was a senior vice President and we called him Pinky.” I said, “It’s hard for me to do it, but I finally did. Now I find down here its Doctor this and Doctor this and mister this,” and I made it clear that I sort of preferred first names. Well afterwards, nobody paid any attention to anything else I said, there was a cocktail party and Eberhard Rees came up to me and he had worked with Wernher Von Braun at Peenemunde and he as the man that really made things work with the V2 and everything. Wernher was a salesman, and he was a good technical person too, but Eberhard came up to me and he said, “Bob,” he said, “I want you to know just last week, Wernher said I could call Wernher.” I said I can’t believe it, Eberhard. I mean you’ve been working with him for 20 years and you’ve been calling him Dr. Von Braun.” He said, “Oh no, he’s Dr. Von Braun.” (laughter)
MR. LARSON: That is the ultimate German formality, right?
DR. SEAMANS: Yeah. So of course, it wasn’t too long after that there was an election and a new President coming in by the name of John F. Kennedy. I wasn’t at all sure whether the next administration I would be around or not. But during the interregnum between the election and the swearing in, there was quite a bit of time to sort of review the where we were going in NASA. I had gone to an Eisenhower cabinet meeting when Keith had described the space program plans and when George Kristiakowsky described a…
[Break in video]
MR. LARSON: Alright fine. You were in the middle of describing some of the vital decisions of confronting NASA at the time.
DR. SEAMANS: Ok, I mentioned that Jim Webb was made the Administrator and it was a remarkable fortuitous choice, I might say. And he agreed to come on the basis that Dr. Driden would stay as a deputy, but there was no decision I realized as to who was going to be the Associate Administrator. So I was asked into his room, into his office, and he asked me a lot of questions that had very little to do with the space program, they were such questions as: what do I think of the organization of Sears-Roebuck and the way they did their business? Fortunately when I was at RCA I had taken a management course and knew a little bit about the subject. So I could compare them with the organizations of Montgomery Ward and after about an hour of this kind of discussion, he said, “Well perhaps we should go out and get a little lunch.” He said, “Where would you like to go for lunch?” I said, “Well Mr. Webb, you know Washington better than I do. Why don’t you make the selection?” And he said, “How about the National Democratic Club?” I said, “I don’t know.” I said, “I better fess up to the issue. Do they accept republicans in there?” And during the lunch he sort of seemed aware of this and a little bit concerned about it. He said, “This isn’t too bad a lunch.” And I said, “No, it’s not too bad,” but after that I found he was very pleased with the fact that we had a bipartisan organization and when I would appear at a podium with him, he always made a point of saying, “I’m a democrat and Bob Seaman here is a republican.” But the question, we were late getting at it because I think five or six weeks had gone by into the Kennedy Administration and we were late at reviewing our budget which is a custom when the President comes in, to review the budget of the previous administration. So we had our meeting with Dave Bell, who was the Director of the Budget and our OMB and we went in and essentially recommended what we recommended to Eisenhower, that we should precede with a Saturn vehicle and with the Apollo project. And Dave Bell said, “Well I’m sure that the President is not ready to make a decision such as this. This is going to take a lot of time to think over and we will consider this in connection with next year’s budget.” But we insisted that this be at least considered by the President and so we had a meeting with him and it was Hugh Driden, Mr. Webb and myself, Glenn Seaborg was there as well because there was a question of a nuclear rocket and I remember Jerry Wiesner and Mack Bundy and I guess the Vice President was there and the President. We had what I thought was a very good discussion of these pros and cons. President Kennedy and I were classmates at Harvard although I must say I didn’t know him very well. It was duly noted that he did not recognize me at the meeting. (Laughter) In any event, he did elect to put in some additional funds for a launch vehicle, but he was no way ready to accept the Apollo program which would have been the next step beyond Mercury and might have then lead to a circum-lunar or lunar landing. But it wasn’t very long after that that a gentleman named Gagarin went into orbit and at that point President Kennedy became very much aware of some of the pitfalls of having the Soviet Union do these things unexpectedly and then explain later why they were so far ahead of us. So he turned to the Vice President who was by then formally made the Chairman of the Space Council and said, “What do we do?” The Vice President had a way of gathering people together to get a consensus, but at least in this case it didn’t lead to any solution. So finally in desperation he turned to Bob McNamara and Jim Webb and said, “Look, you two people,” McNamara was Secretary of Defense and Jim Webb as Head of NASA, “must have the best information available as to what we can and cannot do and what might really make sense.” He said, “I want your report in 10 days.” It turned out that the meeting to discuss this matter occurred on a Saturday morning, the day after Shepard went into suborbital flight. There was a big question whether to let Alan by or not. There was great concern in the White House that if he failed on something that wasn’t even as much as what Gagarin had done we would really look sick in the eyes of the world and incompetent and so on. Finally we made the argument supposing he’s successful, don’t you think that would be quite positive? And it was agreed that yes he would be allowed to go and even by Saturday morning we knew that it had a tremendous effect on Europe that people had watched it on television and they felt that they were sort of a part of it, and so the first discussion was whether to have an open program or not, whether to continue an open program. It was agreed that yes, it had to be an open program. It was also then meant that we had to name our goal and the Russians would know it, but they didn’t have to reveal what they were doing, and so we were playing a game of poker, but our cards were down on the table. Our recommendation was that we ought to go for a lunar landing. We did stand a reasonable chance of getting there before the Soviet Union could get there because a great deal remained to be done, but they did not have in hand all of the boosters and equipment that would be required. Bob McNamara was skeptical. He wasn’t sure about that they couldn’t do it already and possibly the goal should be taking men to the planets. I was horror stricken at that thought.
MR. LARSON: That’s a large magnitude more difficult.
DR. SEAMANS: That’s about a year’s flight, we weren’t sure if human beings could stand it, being weightless and all that. We didn’t know much about the planets.
MR. LARSON: Or the physiology of the individuals.
DR. SEAMANS: Exactly, as well as the psychology. So anyway, the decision was made that, yes, we would recommend that that be the goal. There was a lot of other detail recommendations that were made that had to do with defense as well as some of the NASA unmanned programs. Worked all weekend writing the report. Jim Webb came over at midnight Sunday night and worked all day for the plans for Alan Shepard’s triumphant return to Washington and addressing Congress. Read the whole thing over that I had been working on with John Rugal. The next morning it was signed by McNamara and Jim Webb and was transmitted to the Vice President and at the luncheon at the State Department that was hosted by the Vice president, he actually had in a manila envelope this report, which he then took over to the President and then he left for southeast Asia, his first trip to southeast Asia. Sort of a historic moment in many ways. And of course then began the job of putting it all together. Were we going to hire a lot more people in NASA or are we going to hire contractors? Are we going to need additional centers and where were the centers going to be located and how are we going to work with the Air Force and could we get the Corps of Engineers as we did to put up all the new structures that would be required. A very large number of decisions that had to be made. I guess the most interesting one, certainly from a technical standpoint, was what mode of operation to use. The commonly excepted mode was build a great big pile of rocket stages and so on and all the vehicles for the humans up in the nose and go to the moon and when you get there have enough that you can shoot back to earth and that you have the right reentry capsule to come into the atmosphere.
MR. LARSON: That was a very interesting problem as I remember it. I am very interested to see what your story is as to how you arrived at the decision as you went. That was a very much of a controversial thing.
DR. SEAMANS: It was very controversial and this method called direct descent method was what the German people naturally expected to do. This is what Wernher and his people were prepared to build all those great big rockets. Another possible approach which was considered very seriously at the start was to use a somewhat smaller booster to put a lot of elements in orbit around the earth and bring them all together and then sort or reassemble in earth orbit what would be required to then do exactly the same thing to leave earth orbit to go to the moon and then have enough on the surface of the moon that you could then come back directly to the earth. So these two approaches the direct ascent and the earth orbit rendezvous were the two avenues that were followed almost exclusively for the first year. For example the land acquisition down at the Cape, we finally decided after examining 5 possible sites, Pacific sites as well as Atlantic sites to enlarge the operation at the Cape and make use of the Air Force that was there already, but we acquired Merritt Island which is 87,000 acres on this island which was primarily orange groves so that we could not only build the Saturn booster which would be required for the earth orbit rendezvous, but build something called Nova, which was at least twice as large that would be up in the northern part of Merritt Island, parenthetically it should be noted that this is what the Russians chose to do to build a very large vehicle. But they never were successful in launching. They tried twice and both times it exploded either on the pad or at a very low altitude. Anyway, during my first month in NASA and touring around at different centers, I had met somebody named John Hubert, and he as a young engineering scientist at the Langley field who had a team of five people and they were examining various ways of going to the moon and returning. They had come up with a scheme where you would go to orbit directly around the moon but then you would break off a vehicle and go and land on the moon leaving all of the heavy earth reentry equipment in orbit around the moon and then when you took off you rendezvous and dock with it in lunar orbit and then use the heavy equipment to come back. This meant that you didn’t have to decelerate and then accelerate again this very high mass capsule which talking about on the moon is roughly about 4,000 feet per second at first deceleration and then acceleration takes a lot of fuel. He felt that this would be a much more economical way from an energy standpoint of going to the moon. Well after we were all established and we had Holms left RCA to come down and head this project and he had Wernher Von Braun and Kurt Debus and all these people charging ahead, contractors like North America, Nobel Telephone labs, everybody roaring down on these two approaches of direct ascent or earth orbit rendezvous, I started getting letters from John Hubert. He said, “As the general manager of NASA I would think you would be deeply concerned about the approaches that are being followed. Don’t you feel that you have some responsibility to enter into the decision as to which way to be going?” These letters were quite abrasive letters. I’d read these letters and here was this young guy down there at Langley field and I think, of course I should tear it up just throw it away and forget about it and call up Bob Gilruth on the phone who’s the director of the lab and tell him to get this guy off my back, who’s a pain in the neck, but then I did remember the discussion and also from my experience at RCA with the satellite interceptor realized that that intercept problem really isn’t that difficult. That was what everybody was concerned about. If you fail to rendezvous and dock in lunar orbit, you have bought the farm. You’re not coming back home. You can imagine how catastrophic that could be to astronaut families and world opinion and the whole bit leaving these poor guys to eventually run out of oxygen and orbit around the moon for the rest of eternity. So what I actually did do each time, I got a series of letters, I can’t exactly tell you how many, 3 or 4. I called Bernard Holms on the phone and told him about this idea. Or perhaps I had lunch with him. But I gave him a letter and told him to consider this possibility because it does have some attractive features. After about 6 months, well to begin with he kept saying it’s an interesting idea, but we’re going the other direction, but about 6 months later, one day I was having lunch with Holms and discussing the Apollo program, he said, “You know,” he said, “quite a few in our group are beginning to think that’s the way to go.” He said, “It has another very attractive feature that you can design the vehicle to go down to the lunar surface and come back into orbit, just for that purpose. It can be very different from anything you could possibly use in the atmosphere.” It can have long arms and be very flexible it can have a large window in it so you can look down and see the lunar surface as you come in, we can make it very, very flexible in this operation just for working around the moon. So as soon as it appeared that that might be the way to go, I advised Hugh Driden and Jim Webb that this was beginning to be an attractive idea. I met with them very frequently and tried to keep them up to date. But they could see some of the pitfalls in doing this, but everybody expected us to do something different, a big change like that is bound to come under all kinds of scrutiny by Congress and the White House and so on and sure enough it did. Jerry Wiesner had several people working for him, Jerry Wiesner being Kennedy Science advisor.
MR. LARSON: Oh, yes, I remember.
DR. SEAMANS: At that time, one of them being a person named Nick Gallavan who worked for NASA for a few years, had not been highly regarded because he believed very strenuously in making reliability calculations where you take into account every single part of the rocket for example and then you figure what’s the likelihood of all the parts to work and then sum it all up depending on how it’s all interconnected and then you say, “Gosh, we’ve only got a 10 per cent chance of this thing succeeding.” Well, he proceeded to run an analysis like this on our lunar orbit rendezvous. He felt that the chances of losing astronauts were going to be too high and we ended up with some very difficult negotiations. I call them negotiations really. The most exciting one was when we were showing the President and the Vice President what we were doing first at Huntsville, then at the Cape and then down in Houston, and we were right in the middle of the large assembly area at Huntsville, the President, the Vice President, Bob McNamara, I think Tony Croft, Administer of Defense from Great Britain, Jerry Wiesner and a couple of other people when President Kennedy turned to Jim Webb and said, “I understand you and Jerry don’t see quite eye to eye on how we’re going to the moon.” And we’re in this central part of this great big area and around the outside were all these employees of Huntsville and all the correspondents. All of a sudden we were right there, right in the goldfish bowl arguing about this whole matter, which is what Kennedy enjoyed doing. So we had it out right there. No decision was reached, but Kennedy said, “I want to be kept fully informed of this,” and we could not reach an accommodation with Jerry’s people and so on. And there was finally the day, and I wasn’t there for this one, but from what I understand happened. Jim Webb went over to see the President and said, “Mr. President, you have to decide. You want me to run the project or do you want to have your science advisor?” So it was decided that we would go lunar orbit rendezvous, which proved to be successful.
MR. LARSON: Essentially afterwards, it’s very obvious it was the right way to go, but wasn’t at the time.
DR. SEAMANS: So that was a very, very instructive series of negotiations, studies first, it sort of bore out the fact that you get to keep your antenna open for ideas as you proceed, but you got to use some of your gut feeling or experience if you want to call it that, and you’ve got to lean every now and then to get the machinery to go in the right direction.
MR. LARSON: Well, this is a very interesting story. I remember the controversy of course, but I didn’t know of the origin of the idea. I am delighted that you were able to bring out the circumstances. It’s a very interesting part of history.
DR. SEAMANS: Well, John Hughbald deserves a lot of credit, he really does. Abrasive as he was, he happened to be right. Perhaps I’ve over emphasized the abrasiveness, but he was insistent, no question about that.
MR. LARSON: And dedicated.
DR. SEAMANS: Yeah. Well, perhaps to wrap up NASA, there was a very tough time that we had. It started an afternoon when a large number of people were over at a signing ceremony over at the White House, having to do with space. This was a protocol that was signed by both the Russians and ourselves. Jim Webb used it as an occasion to bring in some of our contractors and give them the opportunity to be at the White House for this occasion and meet with the President. Johnson was the President by then. I was the deputy administrator, Driden had passed away in the interim, and there was going to be a dinner that night before the contractors, but I was having some people at our house including, Dr. Draper and so on. So I went home and I walked in the door and the phone was ringing. It was George Low on the phone from Houston and he said, “They’re gone.” I said, “What do you mean they’re gone?” He said, “Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee are dead. We were running a test on Apollo down at the Cape and we had a fire in the capsule.”
MR. LARSON: I remember that. Devastating.
DR. SEAMANS: That was a devastating event for a great number of people in NASA and it turned out to be devastating on a national basis because people identified with these astronauts. People felt that they almost knew them personally. There were all kinds of investigations and so on. What we did that night of course was to inform everybody, the President. I was talking to the Vice President, actually I went directly to my office, so I could make the calls and Jean wasn’t to tell the guests coming to our house what I was doing, and so they didn’t know until the evening was over. So I started making phone calls. I guess I wasn’t talking to the Vice President, I was talking to McNamara and his office had called to see if the news was true. I said it was. Just as I was talking to him, the operator cut in and said this is an emergency call. So I talked, the emergency was Peter Hackes of NBC telling me that I had to come right over to the NBC studio to explain to the country what was going on. I don’t think I’ve ever been more upset at anybody than I was at Peter Hackes...
MRS. LARSON: Oh my goodness.
DR. SEAMANS: ...for feeling that was where my responsibilities lay.
MR. LARSON: Yes, some of these media people feel that they are the ones that are running…
DR. SEAMANS: That was the last thing that I wanted to do. We arranged that night that we would have a review board. Dr. Tommy Thompson of Langley would head ti. He was very highly respected. The next morning at the crack of dawn I got in the NASA plane, picked him up, went down to the Cape and established the review board. We impounded all of the equipment and everything already. Before they were through, we had a team of about 5,000 people investigating what had happened. Fire experts, we brought in people from the Air Force who had this kind of experience, people from the office of [inaudible] and so on. From the Department of Interior. One of the problems was keeping an umbrella over the investigation so they could come up without sort of explaining what they were doing each day with their findings and recommendations. At the same time we had to keep the President and the Congress and the media informed to some extent about what was going on. The way that was done was for me to go down once a week to the Cape, review with the team that we put together, where they stood, and then on the way back in the airplane, I’d write a report which I then submit to Jim Webb. He would then take it over to the President and then take it up the committees of Congress and then it would be released. These are my ideas and it still left the Committee of the Review Board free to their own recommendations. That was a pretty intense period of time.
MR. LARSON: Oh, yes. That must have been a terrible period to live through.
DR. SEAMANS: There were a lot of very sad personal situations that grew out of it, not the least of course the families of the astronauts. We got through all that. That occurred in February and by the following summer, end of the summer, we had things pretty well back on course. We had to redesign the capsule, leaving out all cloth for example. We, everybody asked the question, “What went wrong? How could this possibly happen?” There isn’t a very good answer to that, except that we tried to test everything. The rocket motors on the stand, we’d shake everything. We’d expose everything to the shock of take-off. One thing we never did was to actually start a fire in a capsule with 100 per cent oxygen. We tested all the equipment that went in for fire. We took all the cloth that we used and we’d light it in a vacuum and see, well light it in 100 percent oxygen and see how it burned, but we had never in an enclosed capsule with 100 per cent oxygen at 14.7 psi, struck a match. We realized that was a deficiency in our test program and we did do that afterwards and we found there was absolutely no way you could extinguish a fire once it started.
MR. LARSON: Yes, I have experienced that administration at Oak Ridge. We had a chamber that had oxygen and we almost had a similar thing unfortunately, not fatal, but it is devastating and unusual, very unexpected.
DR. SEAMANS: The reason we did it was because we did not want to have a two gas system. It would be much simpler just to have pure oxygen and as soon as we were in space we would bleed off the oxygen. Get it down to the equivalent of a partial pressure of oxygen in the atmosphere and it was all at individual need. They don’t need the nitrogen in the air. The solution was really very simple. The solution was that we would start off with atmospheric pressure in the normal area if you will, but we would not recirculate the nitrogen. There was enough leakage in the system that after about an hour you’d have nothing in there but the pressure of the oxygen around 3 and a half, 4 psi. But, as I said, there was a redesign; we had all new material for the astronaut suits and so on. About that time, this is 7 and a half years after arriving at Washington, I only intended to stay about 2. I submitted my resignation to Jim Webb and went back to MIT. I went back; they were nice enough to invite me back as a Hunsaker professor in aeronautical engineering. The only duty I had in the first year as a Hunsaker professor was to deliver one lecture which was called the Merimarten lecture.
MR. LARSON: You didn’t have too much of an academic load then.
DR. SEAMANS: No, that was great fun. Jerry Hunsaker was still coming into his office. He was 84 years old and since I was the Hunsaker professor, he felt quite free to ask me questions whenever he wanted and he asked me some great questions. I had a lot of fun that first year even though in the spring I was going up there to MIT while my family was down here. We got a house up there and in the fall everything was just fine, that following fall. My family and I were up there, we were in a house that we are remodeling. Along about the middle of December, I guess it was, I got a call from somebody named Mel[vin] Laird. I had never met him, but I knew who he was. He was going to be the new Secretary of Defense. He said, “Bob, any chance you’re going to be down in Washington in the next few years?”
MR. LARSON: Sounds like a familiar story.
DR. SEAMANS: Well it turned out this time, I was going to be, because the next day I was going to be in Washington, I was going to fly down to see the launching of the Apollo, Apollo 8 that was going to fly Frank Borman and company around the moon. I was going down to the Cape and I told him that. He said, “Well would you have lunch with me?” And I said, “I certainly would.” He had a room in a hotel there in the middle of Washington which in the room he had all the organization charts of the Department of Defense around the wall. A fellow named Bill Berudy was sort of his executive officer, who’d worked with him up on the hill. Bill was there, Mel Laird wasn’t. I found out this is one of Mel’s habits. He’s not always absolutely on time. But finally he came in and was apologetic for being late. We had, right in the middle of this rather large room, had a table set for two and Bill Brady left, and all during the meal we talked about technical people. He asked me about what I thought of people like Johnny Foster and Al Fletch. I did my best to indicate, to give him my own appraisal of their capabilities. Then all of a sudden he said, “Well, I want you to know now why I’ve invited you to be here. I’d like you to come down and be the Secretary of the Air Force.” I was absolutely stunned. I never even dreamed that was going to happen. I thought there might be some technical job he’d like me to have. So I gave him 19 reasons why that was a very poor idea. And the, he explained what he wanted to have for his three service secretaries. One holdover, he was going to ask Stan[ley] Resor to continue to be the Secretary of the Army. He wanted to have one political person and he said that was going to be, he hoped, John Chafee, who had been the governor of Rhode Island for I think four terms and he wanted to have one technical person and he said he discussed this with a lot of people and they all felt that I was up to it. I didn’t, he finally got me to say that I wouldn’t turn it down right there in the room, that I’d go back and discuss it. So after going down to Florida for the launching, I went back home to discuss it with Jean, my wife who at that time was not very well. So we ended up with some of the discussion in her hospital bedroom. I also was very concerned by then about what my children, what the reaction might be because Vietnam was already not the most popular war that we had ever had and I discussed it with each one of our children individually, our four oldest at least. I explained it to them one by one, and every one of them said that I ought to do it. It wasn’t that they favored the war effort; they preferred to see me in a job than some other people couldn’t think of.
MR. LARSON: Oh yeah.
DR. SEAMANS: So anyway it did turn out that I accepted. But I did beg for some additional time. I got an extra four weeks of time, so that I could finish my work at MIT and deliver this lecture, which I actually delivered after I became Secretary of the Air Force. I called, Howard Johnson was President of MIT and I went over to see him immediately after I got back and Howard said, “You know, Bob, when the President asks you to do something, you got to have an awfully good reason for turning it down.” So I said, “Well, if I except, do you think I still need to give the Merimarten lecture?” He said, “I’ll be very disappointed if you don’t.” He did not let me off the hook. But anyway we were involved with the Air Force for four and a third years. There were some exciting things needless to say. One memorable event talking about space as we have was something called the Manned Orbital Laboratory. The Air Force was going to make use of the Jimenez NASA capsule to have a laboratory in space to try out various ideas for recognizance and so on. This had been a program that had been going on, but had been going on rather slowly. One of the first things I was asked when I was sworn in was to investigate the man orbital laboratory and I knew that there was quite a bit of talk about cancelling it. Well after looking it over I came back with a recommendation. I said, no it ought to be accelerated. If you’re going to have a project like this, you’ve only got so much time when you can have continued support for it. Also if you let things drag on, the total costs, you have to carry a lot of extra costs. The way to do these jobs is to set the goal tight and then go and do it. So that was my recommendation. I could, kept getting this feedback from various people that probably the Manned Orbital Laboratory was going to be cancelled. I thought that would be really terrible to come in and be Secretary of the Air Force and the first thing that gets cancelled is a space project and that’s what my recent experience has been. So I talked to Mr. Laird about it. He allowed me to come in one day a week with an agenda of anything I wanted to discuss for about an hour with him and Mr. Packard, Dave Packard. I’d bring along John McLucas who was my deputy and at one of these meetings I said I knew that this was being considered for cancellation, but I would like the privilege before the final decision was made of discussing it with the President. I felt it was of that importance. So I got one Saturday morning from Mel Laird and he said we have an appointment with the President this afternoon at 3 o’clock to discuss the Manned Orbital Laboratory.
MR. LARSON: He didn’t give you much time for preparation.
DR. SEAMANS: I had done a little bit of work ahead so I had some, a few overhead photographs and things of that sort, so I could talk about various resolutions from various altitudes and the importance of resolution and importance of knowing what was going on around the world, looking at different armaments. So anyway we had the meeting in the Oval Room. As we went in I could see outside I guess it was in the Rose Garden sort of a band of people leaning on their instruments and a podium and obviously there was some great ceremony about to take place. Turns out some Head of State was about to arrive. And the President was at his desk with a yellow pad, Kissinger was there. I took along General Stewart who was in charge of the project, and Mr. Laird. So I started through with the charts and the President kept writing and writing and writing and pretty soon somebody stuck their head in the door and said the ceremony starts in five minutes. The President asked a couple of questions and I kept talking and finally in effect Mr. Laird picked me up by the scruff of the neck and led my out of the room and on Monday I got a call from Kissinger who was the Security Advisor to the President at that time, and in his German accent he said it was a very, very fine presentation. Very, very fine, and on Tuesday I found out it had been canceled.
MR. LARSON: Well these are momentous decisions that come very fast.
DR. SEAMANS: I might just say one thing about the technical endeavor of the Air Force. I won’t take you through all of the projects and the trials and tribulations. I sort of developed a philosophy of how projects, large projects need to be reviewed and it’s my feeling that they have to be reviewed on a periodic basis if you’re really going to know what’s going on. One reading of a project doesn’t tell you very much, it’s what tells you over time is what tells you what is going on. I found that there already was what they called a Secretary’s Weapons Review over in a conference room that I fell heir to. I said, “Let’s go through it just the way you’ve always done it. I’d like to see what the process is.” This was about two weeks after I had joined the Air Force. So I go to walk in the door and there’s a colonel standing there and he flicks his heel like this and sort of salutes and says, “The Secretary of the Air Force,” and everybody jumps up and stands at stiff attention and I sit down at the end of the table and they start going through these slides very fast. After about 20 minutes of this, I said hold it. I like to know how many levels of the Air Force organization hierarchy have reviewed these charts before they came in here. There was sort of a long pause and people started talking and leaning over and talking to each other. Finally General McDonald who was the Chief of Staff of the Air Force said, “Probably about 18.” I said, “Well, I don’t need to spend any more time in here today,” and walked out. I said that henceforth instead of having this review once every three months we’re going to have it once every month and that the person in charge, the Project Manager, where ever he or she was located were going to come in at least once every three months. This was the colonel at right field or whoever it was. There was no point in going through all these middle men. The other times when these reviews were held, somebody should be designated in headquarters who would be the liaison person. It wasn’t fair for people to come from California once a month for this review. This would be the person who had talked to the project person the day before and would come in with how the project stood. So we followed 16 projects. There were only so many projects you could follow in that detail, but I found for example on cost control, the cost obviously at times run out because people don’t do their jobs as well as they should, but often times the colonel at right field who’s building a tactical airplane will be visited by the four star general who’s in charge of the tactical air command will want to review the project and will find that this, that, and the other thing will not be included on this new airplane, would be appalled that this won’t have this, that, and the other thing, would order this colonel, if he knew what was good for him, to insert that into the program.
MR. LARSON: Oh yeah.
DR. SEAMANS: And so the colonel could be in a very tough spot. But by having the colonel come in and when these kind of possibilities come up we had the general in charge of tactical air command in the room and we’d have the project person and the chief of staff of the Air Force and the deputy chiefs of staff in charge of R and D and so on and we’d have the assistant secretaries and we’d present the pros and cons that way rather than having it result from the colonel being leaned on with a very unfair advantage of four ranks against him. So we started in that period of time, the B-1 bomber which is now come back to life, the F-15 fighter, a tactical fighter, the so called A-10, the A-wax airplane was started during that period, an early warning airplane. We got out of the woods on the F-111 which had received quite a bit of notoriety as a TFX the previous 10 years. We had the problems of the C-5 airplane to contend with.
MR. LARSON: You were there at a period of real controversy.
DR. SEAMANS: I found there was somebody in the Air Force named Ernie Fitzgerald that I, who was very much admired by a Senator Proxmire.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. SEAMANS: I received letters even before I joined the Air Force about what a wonderful public servant we had in Ernest Fitzgerald and he was sure I would make good use of him. It fell on my lap to fire him. Just as I was leaving the Air Force after four years, there was an open civil service hearing which had never been done before, which he insisted on. So with the press present and without, I was not allowed to have council because a civil service hearing they try to get the views of all the individuals. So I was there as an individual.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. SEAMANS: But Ernie had his lawyers and as a result of that hearing, he was reinstated and he got all his back pay and he ended up suing me and several others for $3 million and the case was only resolved in my favor, I think, about a year and a half ago.
MR. LARSON: I’ll be darned. That’s an amazing story there. One individual can stir up so much controversy.
DR. SEAMANS: But I got myself in a book that he wrote when he wasn’t working for the Air Force that was called The High Priests of Waste. I’m the star villain.
MR. LARSON: On many of these things, accomplishment is almost forgotten to review trivialities on this thing. It’s very disturbing.
DR. SEAMANS: Just about this time, let’s see, Nixon was reelected and Mel Laird only said he would stay for one term. Elliot Richardson came in as the Secretary of Defense. As a matter of fact I got a call from him when I was in Anchorage, when I was about to leave for Antarctica with Guy Stever. I thought gosh he’s going to call me back to the United States, but no. I explained what I was going to do and he said, “No, you better take your trip but see me as soon as you get back, which was in December. So we flew down to Christ’s Church and went down to Antarctica which was a very interesting trip. It was the most interesting trip I’ve had in my life. We went down with a couple of Russians from Vastak to the South Pole and put some new rivets in a shelter down there and so on. But then when I got back and talked to Elliot I was very impressed with the way he was taking over that responsibility. I explained to him that I really wanted to get out of the Air Force. I had been there for four years and I thought that was long enough. The average was 1.8 years for a Secretary of the Air Force. By the time I got out, I was there longer than anybody, excepting Gene Zukor, who was there for five years.
MR. LARSON: I saw Gene the other day.
DR. SEAMANS: Did you really? But the last week that I was there, things were starting to come unraveled a little bit with [John] Ehrlichman and [Harry Robbins, Bob, H.R.] Haldeman and all of those kinds of things. We had morning sessions, every Monday morning there was the, what was it called? The Secretaries Conference and at 9:30 in the morning and the Joint Chiefs and the service secretaries sat around a table with the Secretary and the deputy Secretary and around the outside of the room were all the assistant secretaries of defense and it was sort of a normal routine we went through with different people reviewing different things that were going on. But this time, Elliot started off and he said, “I have something to report to you and I’m discussing it with you with a heavy heart.” He said, “I was at Camp David last night and the President asked me to be the Attorney General.” He said, “So I’ll be leaving here the end of this week.” So actually the time I left he was already being consumed with the problem he was really going to get into as Attorney General. [James] Schlesinger hadn’t been named as the new Secretary of Defense. And so I ended up leaving the Pentagon. I had written a letter and so on, but I had never gotten a response. I went over and became the President of the Academy of Engineering and the first thing I did was issue a news release saying in effect that Bob Seaman’s is no longer at the Pentagon. He’s over here at the Academy.
MR. LARSON: Fine. At that particular point should we just pause for a moment?
DR. SEAMANS: Sure.
MR. LARSON: Fine.
[End of Interview]

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PIONEERS IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY SERIES
ORAL HISTORY OF DR. ROBERT SEAMANS
Interviewed by Clarence Larson
Filmed by Jane Larson
Date Unknown
Transcribed by Jordan Reed
MR. LARSON: …Seamans and our series of video tapes, “Pioneers in Science and Technology.” Dr. Seamans received his higher education at Harvard and MIT and following this he has had a distinguished career in the aerospace research and development. He was Deputy Administrator of NASA, Secretary of the Air Force, President of the National Academy of Engineering, Founder and Administrator of the Energy Research and Development Agency, Dean of the School of Engineering at MIT, and Distinguished Professor of Environment and Public Policy. He has served on the Board of Directors of many private and public corporations and he has been awarded the Cabot Medal, the Distinguished Service Award of NASA, the Distinguished Public Service Medal, and the Sperry Award just to mention a few. It gives me great pleasure to present Dr. Robert Seamans. Please precede, Dr. Seamans.
DR. SEAMANS: Well, I’m very happy to have this chance to sit here and chat with you and your wife and going back to the beginning when I became aware of things like math and physics and so on. I was at a small school in Lenox, Massachusetts, an Episcopal school. We had mass, there was a minister, but it was like he was also very interested in science and technology, which is sort of an amazing combination. He encouraged several of us in high school who showed a propensity for, showed an interested in math and physics and carried us perhaps somewhat further than some would normally go in high school.
MR. LARSON: Just to perhaps to orient ourselves as a period of time, what were the years that you perhaps spent in high school and grade school.
DR. SEAMANS: Well, I started high school in ’33, graduated from high school in 1936.
MR. LARSON: Oh, yes.
DR. SEAMANS: And I had very little in the way of concept of what I might want to eventually do. I thought of going to the University of Wisconsin, I think partly because I would be further away from home and most of my relatives had been. When it finally came down to the wire, I did the check in at Harvard and I was accepted at Harvard where my father had been and my uncle had gone, and so on. I started in college, I took the normal courses and I went out and tried to play football, hockey and baseball. I wasn’t terribly good at it. I got beaten up on the line of scrimmage quite a few times but I did find that there were some courses that I liked a lot better than others at Harvard. These courses again were in mathematics and physics. It was then at Harvard, an undergraduate program called Engineering Sciences. I found that by getting involved in that particular line of endeavor I didn’t have to take what were called divisional examinations. I didn’t have to have a tutor. It was a little bit less disciplined than some of the other series of courses.
MR. LARSON: Do you remember any of your college professors at that time?
DR. SEAMANS: Yes. Professor Hartline was my, he was a civil engineer and also a classmate of my fathers. I first got to know him between freshman and sophomore year. I decided there was no point in hanging around all summer so I went up to the Harvard Civilian Camp up at Squam Lake and learned how to level up a transit and go out there and tape through the underbrush, make maps and contour lines and put in railroads on paper and all that sort of thing and I found I really enjoyed it.
MR. LARSON: The usual engineering, starting engineering curricula.
DR. SEAMANS: That’s exactly what it was. I found that by a fluke, at the end of the summer I had the equivalent of about a year and a half’s work at Harvard. There was a required English course for all freshmen, unless you got over a certain grade at Harvard in your college boards and I got over that grade, even though I wasn’t suppose to be very good in English. I had a cousin exactly my age who was terribly good in English, and he had to take the required course and I didn’t and the family was absolutely positive that the exams got crossed up when they were graded.
MR. LARSON: That’s a very amusing incident.
DR. SEAMANS: Yeah, but in any event I decided to try to go through college in three years, and I did. I actually graduated in 1939. I was of the class of 1940. And I guess I was lucky that it worked out that way part way through my junior year, which was my last year of studies, I developed a shortness of breath and I found I couldn’t exercise and so on. It turned out I had rheumatic fever.
MR. LARSON: Oh my.
DR. SEAMANS: What would have been normally my senior year in college, I was in bed for three months and wasn’t allowed to get out of bed but for 5 minutes the first day, 10 the second, and so on, until the summer after I would have graduated in 1940. I was back living a pretty normal existence, but I felt that that three months in bed and another six months to get reconstituted, while I wouldn’t wish it on anybody, it was really a very valuable experience. I had a chance to really think a great deal about what I wanted to do and I also had the benefit of a very large number of people who were very thoughtful, who came in to see me, one-on-one conversations with people and I got to know people much better than you do in sort of casual conversation like you would on the street or at a large party or something of that sort.
MR. LARSON: Well, that’s wonderful that you had that opportunity. I suppose you also had a chance to do quite a bit of reading.
DR. SEAMANS: I did a lot of reading and as a result of that, I thought instead of following the engineering line, maybe some form of medicine might be more challenging and so on. So the summer after I was back on my feet, I went back to Harvard. I had my degree, but I went back there and I took premed courses that summer. At that point, I became rather uncertain as to what I might do. I found that I wasn’t particularly enamored of cutting into animals and various things. Some of the engineering I had done seemed a little more attractive. You asked me what faculty were there at Harvard at that time. [Jacob Pieter] Den Hartog, who eventually went to MIT, was then teaching mechanical engineering, and he was a most stimulating person at Harvard. Then a fellow named William Bolle taught aerodynamics. I as a junior helped calibrate a wind tunnel that he was building there in the musty old building that we used for engineering. So I waited as I drove into Cambridge as to which way I ought to go. The engineering made more sense. So I actually enrolled in Harvard at the Engineering, School of Engineering. After the second day, a friend of mine said, “You know, I’m not actually certain that we are getting the best possible education here at Harvard in Engineering.” He said, “We might do better if we were doing graduate work at MIT.” He said, “I’m going over there this afternoon. Would you care to come along with me?” I didn’t know anything about MIT really at that time, but I said, “Sure.” I would be glad to go with him and keep him company. The first place we went was logically the admissions office and Dean Thresher had a few moments to spare and my friend explained what he had in mind and Dean Thresher was very thoughtful and asked me what I had done in college, although I wasn’t really interested in transferring, but I told him. He said, “You two boys apparently have done quite good work at Harvard and you have taken some courses that will give you some credit here at MIT. I think we can start you both off here as sophomores.” At that point, we both stood up and thanked him very much and headed for the door, not at all interested in being undergraduates again, when he said, “Possibly you could get more credits if you go around to each department at MIT. If you filled out this form here which will show what courses you took at Harvard, what the textbooks were, the subject matter, and so on. Just go around to each department at MIT and just see what they would give you in equivalent courses.” Well, my friend was absolutely disgusted with this and we got out to the car and said he was going back to Harvard. Now, I can’t tell you why, but I was just intrigued with the idea of listing all the courses I had taken and not only as an undergraduate, but also in high school and going around and bargaining with everybody at MIT in these various departments. I was doing quite well. I found pretty soon I was up to a junior year and maybe a senior year. I ended up in aeronautical engineering with a person named R.H. Smith. Dr. [Jerome Clarke] Hunsaker was then the head of the department, but this was 1940, and he was already very busy in Washington. He had been in the Navy and he also was involved with the NACA, the National Advisory Committee in Aeronautics. R.H. Smith was the sort of acting head of the department. He said, “I just don’t understand why you want to come over here and be an undergraduate when you have your bachelor’s degree.” I said, “Well, of course I don’t want to do that, but Dean Thresher said I didn’t have enough credit to come to MIT as a graduate student.” He said, “Well, that’s ridiculous.” He looked at what I had done and he said, “I’ll call him right now.” They had quite an argument over the phone. I could tell what the conversation, how it was going and I was able to interject a few things. I had had this and that and the other thing that Thresher said I hadn’t had. Then R.H. Smith said, “Well, it’s settled. You come over here now as a graduate student in aeronautical engineering.”
MR. LARSON: You made a lot of progress. (Laughter) From being a sophomore undergraduate to a graduate student.
DR. SEAMANS: This was in 48 hours. I thought it was great fun. Then he turned to me and he said, “Do you know how long it is going to take to get a master’s of science degree in aeronautical engineering?” I said, “I really don’t.” He said, “Well, you do have a fair number of deficiencies in aeronautical engineering.” He said, “I think it will probably take you about three years.” I said, “That’s quite a while isn’t it.” And he said, “Unless you want to concentrate in instrumentation.” I said, “Well, how long would that take?” He said, “Well, I don’t really know.” “And what exactly is it?” He said, “I’m not exactly sure.” He said, “There is a Dr. [Charles Stark] Draper who is responsible for instrumentation here. Why don’t you go around and see him and he can tell you about it.”
MR. LARSON: Well, that’s a fabulous story to be able to get connected up with Dr. Draper in that way.
DR. SEAMANS: So I went around to see Dr. Draper and he said, “Well, the best way for you to find out is to take my course. It’s starting next Monday and see what you make of it.” I said, “How long will it take?” He said, “To get a degree, that’s going to be up to you.” He said, “I don’t think it would take three years if you really get going and work hard. Take a reasonable number of courses each term.” So the next Monday I was there all registered at MIT, much to the amazement of my parents who thought I might be doing something a little bit peculiar to resign from Harvard and go to MIT.
MR. LARSON: Very unorthodox behavior to say the least.
DR. SEAMANS: Yes. So, I went in this classroom in Building 33 there, the Guggenheim Laboratory, so called and I noticed that Dr. Draper didn’t have on a coat. He had on a green eye shade and the classroom was just absolutely full of students. People were standing up in the back of the room. He came in and he said, “I know there are some of you that don’t really know what you want to do and you’re not sure whether you want to be engineers or not.” He said, “I’ll tell you if you want to be engineers don’t expect to be able to buy a lot of horses or buy mink coats for your wives, that sort of thing,” but he said, “I’ll guarantee you’ll have a lot of fun.” That was sort of the spirit of the course. It was a lot of fun. I did stay working with him for 15 years.
MR. LARSON: I didn’t realize that ‘cause Dr. Draper is known for his tremendous research contributions. I had no idea he was such an outstanding teacher also.
DR. SEAMANS: Well he was a remarkable teacher because he involved us really in the work he was doing. He would come into the classroom and actually discuss the kind of thing he had been doing over the weekend and the examples that we had to work on for the course were not examples or questions or problems that had been handed out over the years. They were new problems that were brand new and right up to date, and that’s what made it exciting. Everybody who took his courses were stimulated by him and the people he gathered around him, Waldo McKay and some other faculty there. So It turned out two semesters later, that is by the following, I guess it was July 1941, I finished all the course work that was required for my master’s degree and only lacked the thesis to get my master’s of science degree and so I went around to see Doc, as he was called, students included, and I said, “Doc, I need a thesis to get my degree. Do you have any suggestions?” He said, “Well, we have a program with the Sperry Telescope Company that makes some vibration measuring equipment and if you cared to work on some aspect of that,” he said, “I think we could pay you a stipend as you work on your thesis.” I thought, “My goodness, imagine getting paid to go to college. That would be great.” And so I started in August, the summer of ’41. My boss was an instructor by the name of [Homer] Oldfield, nicknamed Barney for the racetrack driver. And I was a research assistant. It wasn’t very long after that Barney Oldfield, turns out was in the Army Reserve and he was called to active duty. Dr. Draper called me into his office and said, asked me if I would like to be an instructor that fall. I said, “Well that would be just fine.” I was a little apprehensive about being an instructor, but I figured, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”
MR. LARSON: Yes. Being an instructor at MIT is sort of a deplorable undertaking.
DR. SEAMANS: Yes, and that turned out to be a very valuable experience. So I was able, all during the war, I was there at MIT working in part as an instructor, and then three years after that becoming an assistant professor and I was also doing research in the instrumentation lab with Doc Draper, in part on conventional aircraft instruments and in part on fire control for the Navy, anti-aircraft fire control, as well as fire control for the Air Force for gun firing equipment for fighters as well as a bomb site. So, I ended up…
[Break in Audio]
DR. SEAMANS: …you know working a seven day a week proposition there. I had, there were Navy students coming through, I guess it was the V-12 program. They would come in as I think lieutenants and they would be at MIT for three months. They would split into two groups and each group took a course in instrumentation for six weeks and then the other group would come in for six. I taught that course I think 14 times and there was never a gap other than a weekend between each group, just going right around the clock, and of course at the beginning there were many of the Navy coming through that were considerable older than I was and with some of them coming from the well-known instrument companies. It wasn’t long before they figured out that they knew more than I did. So they would try to bait me. I found a pretty good technique to deal with them. I would find out who they were and where they were from and then I would say to the class, “We are very fortunate to have John Smith from the Bendix Corporation,” and I would invite them to give one of the lectures. I found that usually shut them up pretty rapidly. They didn’t like the idea of having to come front and center, and having to do any work.
MR. LARSON: Yes, that was a very good technique.
DR. SEAMANS: So, that was the sort of the war experience. I remember on the 24th of December, Doc coming in and saying, “I don’t think we need to come in and work tomorrow being Christmas Day.” It was an amazingly intense period of time with both the academic side of it as well as the research and development side tied in primarily with the Navy and the Air Force.
MR. LARSON: Yes, of course, MIT had so many important active programs in the defense effort. So there must have been a real hot bed of activity in all the fields there at MIT.
DR. SEAMANS: Of course, the radiation lab was there, which Lee DuBridge was the director of and ran so effectively, and Gordon Brown in electrical engineering had a serial mechanism lab. When the war was over, the question of what to do and so on. The research side of things we realized that one of the problems that we had with the fire control with aircraft was the airplane itself, that the computers and sights and so on were better than, or more capable with coming up with the right answer than the pilot was in flying the airplane. So we suggested to the Air Force that there should be a project where we would actually measure the performance of an airplane in flight and then run some tests with some fire control equipment to see how, where in the largest errors occurred. Did they occur in the inertia of the airplane, or the control surface of the airplane, or the pilot’s inability to follow the information from the sight, or was it actually in the computer itself. So this was called the Tracking Control Project. This was the first project that I established. I figured out that this would be a good thing to do and I got the project sold and got it funded and I ran it for about three years’ time. It was a very exciting project. I might just interject one thing though before going back, thinking of the war, one of the projects that we had was for automatic gun laying for a director system that was going to be used to shoot down kamikazes. This meant that we had to track with radar because the kamikazes were all coming in with the sun behind them. So you couldn’t look up and see the plane coming, so you had to track it with radar. You had to have the sight and so on. The problem, the equipment was built and then it was found it was very difficult to acquire the target in the first place. Doc Draper came up with the idea of how this could be done and he gave me the job of rounding up the equipment and taking it down. The first installation was on a ship called the Bon Homme Richard, which was one of our aircraft carriers, one of the larger ones. So with great zeal, I got the servo drives and the various things that were going to be required to, for the target acquisition system. I put it in the back of a Hertz car and drove down to Bayonne, New Jersey, where the ship was tied out. It took me about 24 hours to get through the gate and then when I got to the ship, they wouldn’t allow me on the ship. When I finally got on the ship, the gunnery officer said, “Nobody, but nobody was going to touch any of the equipment on the ship.” Suddenly, I can see not somebody, a very young man from MIT. They had all the green checks you see, where everything was tagged and was ready to go to sea.
MR. LARSON: A few obstacles in your way there.
DR. SEAMANS: So I got a hold of Doc Draper on a pay phone while standing out on the dock. He in turn called somebody in Washington and later on in the day, Admiral Mortel from the Bureau of Ordinance arrived and explained to the gunnery officer this equipment was going on the ship. But by the time I started to work on it, the ship was about to sail. So a lot of the work, there were three of these installations to make, were while we went out for the ships first trial at sea. This is in the middle of winter, out of Bayonne, New Jersey. They found a place where I could sleep which happened to be right by the place where the elevators go up and down all night long with all the airplanes on them. I found that I had to tie into one cable that was down in the keel of the ship and another set of cables were up in the skipper’s sea quarters up on top of the bridge and I was tearing around with these wiring diagrams trying to figure out where all these wires were so I could interconnect them. I also found there were Western Electric people on board who had responsibility for the radar. In a few cases, I would make some connections, I had to, to their equipment, but when I’d come back two hours later, I’d find they disconnected the wiring I had already put in there. They didn’t like anybody meddling with their equipment. Anyways, after about a week, the equipment seemed to be working and they actually had trials at sea, where the plane came over telling a target and they fired away and everything to work all right. I was put ashore off the coast of Norfolk. I had to go down the side of the ship with a robe ladder, holding my oscilliscope that I had taken out of the laboratory at MIT and jumped into a launch and took me to shore and there was a message for me to call Dr. Draper as soon as I arrived ashore. His deep concern was I had taken an Avis car and the Avis Company was very distraught that they couldn’t find me or the car and where the keys to the car so they could send a driver down to take the car back to Boston. He was very pleased the equipment worked. I had to wind my way back to Boston by train from Richmond, sitting between cars on bags, all the trains were so terribly crowded. I arrived back in Boston with a word that the next morning I was to go out on a destroyer and I was to put similar equipment aboard this destroyer. But it was very gratifying in that these ships after they got this equipment were out in the Pacific and were able to shoot down some of the kamikazes at least.
MR. LARSON: Yes, I believe that that equipment plus the development of the proximity fuse and a few other things really almost turned the tide on aircraft defense.
DR. SEAMANS: But I had a very small role in all that but going back to the Tracking Control Project. Here was a project where for the first time, I had conceived something that needed to be done and was able to assemble a team that turned out to be about 35 people we had working. One of the aspects of the project was that in those days it was multi-disciplinary. The term is used a great deal today to include everything from environmental engineering to social science. But in those days you found very seldom you even had a project where electrical engineers and aeronautical engineers worked together. We had to do that in this project. We had to try to simulate how the airplane might respond and there weren’t simulators then we actually had to build an analog computer as a part of the project so we could try to anticipate how the airplane would respond. We had to test the airplane. We found that there just wasn’t data available that would tell us how an airplane would respond to controls dynamically. I found there was work being done at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory in Buffalo where they were actually oscillating the controls and measuring the response of the airplane. We installed the equipment on an A-26 aircraft so that we could oscillate first the elevator, then the rudder, then the airlines at different speeds and so on so we could see what happened. It was a pretty laborious process needless to say. Then we experimented with more of a pulse where you would have two stops on the control column and have the pilot, just as fast as he could just do this and do that and measure the response and it turned out you got the same data that way and you, it didn’t take as long to get the information. We did the same thing with the autopilot, put in dynamic signals and measure the response and with the radar so that when we were with our computer able to simulate it and it seemed to be stable. Then very cautiously we started tying the whole system together and flying it and those were really exciting days.
MR. LARSON: Yes, well it was of course, the year before, pilots flew by the seat of their pants so to speak. Now you’re getting into the controls which increase the effectiveness fantastically.
DR. SEAMANS: One of the, this is work that was did with Wright Field. There was a colonel in charge of the armament lab out there named Lee Davis. He became a general in the Air Force, but he was overall, responsible for this project along with a lot of other projects and this was at the same time that the first jet bombers were being built out at the Boeing Company. They found when they first flew, this was a B-47, and that if the pilot wasn’t careful, the airplane would go into quite a violent oscillation, lateral oscillation. They decided that the thing to do was to put a servo mechanism in there that would drive the router that would cause the airplane to fly straight, but they weren’t allowed to connect it without Air Force approval. This was a very wild thought in those days. You might not have the pilot do the whole job, you see. I got a call from Colonel Davis and he said he was going out to Seattle and he would like me to join him out there to review the possibility of putting in these dynamic controls in the B-47. We arrived out there and met with the Boeing people and they said that they wanted to connect the servo and Colonel Davis said well where is the information on the airplane as to how it is going to respond dynamically. The same kind of information we had been getting on our airplane. They said that they didn’t have it right there with them. he said well where is it. It was over in another building in another part of Seattle. He said well go and get it. They said it would take quite a while. We said we would sit here and wait, you just go get it. Well it turned out that they didn’t have the data and so the decision that we made wasn’t very astute. We said why didn’t they try it but turn it on very gradually so that if anything catastrophic was going to happen, if they turned it on very slowly, they would be able to turn it off. It did work and hence forth all of the 47’s and then the B-52’s, and the B-36’s all had automatic equipment that helped stabilize them. Of course today, there are actually airplanes that are flying for the Air Force where there is not even a cable that goes from the control column back to the control surface. It is all done automatically by wire. But that was furthest from our thoughts back in those days. When this project, this so called tracking control project did lead us into quite a few interesting problems. One was on the B-36, which was probably the largest plane the Air Force ever built. It was a mammoth thing, it had six propellers and it also had, as I remember it, four jet engines on it. So it actually had 10 engines. It was so large that to go from one end to the other you had a tube that you got on and you’d line your back and the thing would travel on a track from one end of the plane to the other. It would sort of be shot from one end to the other. And the concern with that plane was it was so big that it was a question of where you put the instruments because the front end of the plane wasn’t necessarily wiggling the same as the rear end of the plane. So we got into that problem in connection with our project. How do you take into account the fact that these airplanes are big and floppy and not just absolutely ridged like a fighter airplane? Anyway, sort of out of that experience, we dually submitted our information and wrote our reports and that was sort of the end of that project. I was asked if I would become what was called the systems engineer on a media project at MIT. The media project was started by the Navy, the Bureau of Ordinance right after World War II to see what could be done educationally primarily at places like MIT and Johns Hopkins and so on to introduce missile experience into the aeronautical and electrical curricula to be based on the experience of Germany where they had the V-1’s and the V-2’s and we really didn’t have anything that was quite equivalent to that in our country. There was hope that there was research that would go along with the academic work that would actually move the science and engineering ahead. The program started at MIT at about 6 or 7 different departments. Guy Stever was very actively involved with it at the start and it was a program in electrical engineering, for example. Jerry [Jerome] Wiesner was involved with certain kinds of radar, but as time went on the Navy seemed to become less interested in the work in different disciplinary areas. They said in effect, “Where’s the missile? Not where’s the beef? Where’s the missile?” (Laughter)
MR. LARSON: This was in such an early stage in the development of missiles.
DR. SEAMANS: And really when MIT got into it, they really hadn’t expected to, that they were going to have to deliver a missile. For the time I was asked to join it, they wanted a missile and they wanted MIT to come up with sort of the concept and technology and Bel-Aircraft Company was going to build the missile. So I ended up learning a great deal, frankly, about organization. I found that to get 7 different departments at MIT with a lot of faculty involved all working together on a single project was a little more than I ever encountered before.
MR. LARSON: Sometimes getting two departments to work together is a tremendous task.
DR. SEAMANS: Right. The method that seemed to be necessary was called a central group that would in addition to the departmental efforts, a central engineering group that would have overall responsibility, it was an agonizing problem I found to get the space, the location, everybody’s agreement that the money would be spent on the central group and not be distributed around to all the departments. As I say, it was an exercise that I found very helpful in years that were to follow in places like NASA and the Air Force. The problems were very similar, but on a much larger scale. We didn’t proceed, I guess quite rapidly enough because after, we did actually build a developmental missile. We did get it out of Point McGoo on the west coast. It was on the slung underneath what was called an F3D aircraft. We trained the pilots to fly it. We went out on a range and try shooting at a drone target. The technology had gone beyond towing sleeves and you had remotely controlled drones that you could fire at. But there was great impatience in Washington. We weren’t moving more rapidly and so on. I can remember one day when I got a call from a person named Bob Briggs who was in charge of a project out there. He said, “It’s gone,” and I said, “What do you mean ‘it’s gone’?” He said, “I mean the missile is gone.” I said, “Well, it can’t be.” He said, “It is.” He said, “We were flying around on this course,” which was like a race course, where you went around and the target would be out over the ocean and as the F3D came around the corner it would go out after the drone and then fire the missile. That was the idea. But when going around the corner, neither the pilot nor the R-engineer who’s on the right hand side were looking, the missile dropped off the airplane. This is one of life’s darkest moments. I said, “Do you know approximately when it came off?” And they knew approximately. They were just going out with the Navy to see if they could find it. I said, “Well, what kind of terrain is down there?” They said, “Well, its farm land.”
MR. LARSON: Oh my goodness.
DR. SEAMANS: It actually turned out to be a very large bean field, you see. And lo and behold they did find the spot where the missile had hit the ground and had gone underground about 15 feet in this bean field and they had to get out there and dig a great big hole and of course everybody in the vicinity was terribly interested and they had to quarter it off and pull this thing out and take it back to our laboratory.
MR. LARSON: That’s amazing they were able to find it, almost like a needle in a hay stack.
DR. SEAMANS: So then of course they had to say something to the public at large. So they wrote this story, heroic story about this Marine pilot in the airplane who realized he had to jettison this missile and so he carefully selected this bean field where he could drop it.
MR. LARSON: Very good public relations.
DR. SEAMANS: That’s right. We did have one more missile and we were able to fire it. It did work well enough that we got some good information, but we decided to disconnect, discontinue this project.
MR. LARSON: What year was that?
DR. SEAMANS: This was in 1950, summer of 1953.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. SEAMANS: So when it was discontinued, there was the question of what would happen with this group that I had accumulated as sort of the system engineering group. It was converted over into what was called the Flight Control Laboratory and I became its director. We ended up with a number of projects. One of them was a hydro-foil boat that Gibson Cox was working on. They didn’t know how to control it to keep it so it would be stable when it went up on the foils. So we were able to salvage some of the equipment from our media project and put it on the ship and we had a very interesting time over that two year period. We got to the point where you could fly this hydro-foil boat, just like an airplane, make bank turns and so forth with it. We had a variety of other projects, but there came a time when I got a call from RCA and they were interested in having me consider coming and working for them in a systems laboratory that they were going to start in Camden, New Jersey. Would I come down and visit them there? Well, I came down to Camden, New Jersey, and wasn’t enchanted with the environment there and advised them that, no, I wasn’t really interested in leaving Cambridge. Actually, there was a family reason for not leaving as well. We have one son who is very hard of hearing and he as doing very well with a special educational program and we felt that if we moved to New Jersey or Washington or what have you, that it would be very difficult for him. So I advised them that I wouldn’t accept. So anyways, about a week later they said, “Well, would you be willing to start a laboratory for RCA in the Boston area?” Well, that was very, very interesting and challenging.
MR. LARSON: And I would say very complimentary. There are several instances in history where corporations have wooed institutions to suit the needs of the chief investigator. So you would join a very unique group there.
DR. SEAMANS: It turned out that MIT at that time was getting quite concerned that the tail might be wagging the dog in that there was too much research going on for the amount of education and I knew they were, Dr. Killian and Straten, Jay Straten had this concern. So it seemed as though maybe making the move and possibly being able to hire some of the people in the Flight Control Laboratory would work out well. And that is what happened. The Flight Control Laboratory came to an end and maybe 50 per cent of the people who worked in it, of course each individual, it was a free choice. And that is how we were able to get off to a pretty fast start in the old Waltham Watch Building out near route 128.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. SEAMANS: And I was introduced then to another kind of organization, namely a large corporation with quite a few levels of organization would tend to move in and tell us how to improve our operation.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. Those most have been some of the early days of route 128, the developing of route 128.
DR. SEAMANS: After about a, there were some wonderful people at RCA. Elmer Engstrom was one. And he was at the corporate level and he was a tremendous help when certain problems came along. One of them was after a while the Waltham Watch Building was seen not to be the ultimate answer. Other people had moved into other parts of it and it was a sort of dreary building to put it mildly. And RCA decided then it was going to be sort of advantageous then to have a sort of engineering laboratory there in the Boston Area. We were able to collect some very good people and so on. So they decided that they would, that it would become more permanent, which meant finding some land and putting up a building. We made a map of where everybody lived and at that time I was living down in Beverly and of course I would have liked to have the lab in Beverly, but I knew I’d lose about 50 per cent of the people if I moved it that far. I edged it as far as possible in the direction of Beverly along 128 which turned out to be Burlington, Mass[achusetts], where there turned out to be very, very few laboratories, and very, very few manufacturing operations at that time. If you go there now, you’ll find clustered around where RCA finally put their building maybe 40 or 50 other companies that are located in that area. It’s kind of amazing.
MR. LARSON: Fantastic growth there.
DR. SEAMANS: But anyway, the question was: what kind of a building would we have there? I wanted a multi-storied building and so on. They said, “No, we’re not really sure you’re going to succeed so we want to have it a one story building and the clearance throughout, if we find you’re not going to succeed, we want to be able to convert it to a warehouse.” So I think it was 12 foot clearance throughout in the event that we have to give up the lab and go to a warehouse. I said, “Ok, I’ll go with that, but let’s make it in the shape of an H so that you don’t have to walk too far to get from one part of the building to another.” They said, “That would be fine.” When I went to look at the design, this was at corporate headquarters in New York, I found that the building was absolutely square and had no windows. I said, “We agreed it was going to be H shaped.” They said, “Well, it is we just took the ends and folded them in.” So it turned out to be a square. That’s when I went to Elmer Engstrom and I said, “Look, there is no way I can hire good, competent, technical people to work in a block house with no windows,” and he stepped in at the corporate level and he was senior Vice President so we got the building we wanted. One of the projects that we became involved in had to do with space. RCA started in ’55 and in ’57, [Yuri] Gagarin went into orbit and soon after that NASA was formed and there was a lot of concern in the Department of Defense about satellites going over head and the thought that we should at the very least be able to go up and inspect what was there and possibly even to intercept. And right out of the Secretary of Defense’s office we obtained a project, SD-10 as I remember it, Secretary of Defense 10, and it was called the SAINT project, Satellite Interceptor. That was the first time I had to really had to consume myself with orbital parameters and so on, but it really was the same technology that we started off on back in the days of fighter airplanes and then the missiles and now the satellites, maneuvers and so on, really weren’t that different, mathematically speaking, and even some of the technology was very similar. The only difference was one of the, the largest difference was when you got in space, you had to have control surfaces, you had to have little jets to drive you where you wanted to go.
MR. LARSON: Yeah, the driving mechanism and the control mechanism are quite different.
DR. SEAMANS: Right. We still had the problem of orienting the vehicle the right way, so that when you fired the jets you’d go in the direction you wanted. Well, I’d known Cortland Perkins for quite a period of time. He and I first were sort of shoulder to shoulder when we were working on our master’s theses back in the basement of Building 33 at MIT. I like to point out it was right where they took all the trash out and on the street every night. That is where we were located. By this time, this is 1959, he was assistant Secretary of the Air Force. At that time there was a laboratory in Holland that was set up to do electronic research for NATO. There was a laboratory right near the Hague and there had always been a US director. The director who was there was about to retire and he asked me if I would be interested in going over there and being the director. So after chatting with him about it and finding out about it, I went home to my wife, Jean, and we figured by then our son Toby was far enough along, he was actually at a boarding school and that probably doing something quite different was in order. It was sort of interesting to be over there in Holland for three years. The work appeared to be in line with the kind of thing I had been doing and I felt that I could handle it. So we agreed we’d do it. Well, just about the time my name was going to be submitted, the U2 was shot down over the Soviet Union. Khrushchev came to this country and this was the time when he was pounding the podium at the UN with his shoe and so on.
MR. LARSON: A very historic moment there.
DR. SEAMANS: Oh, yes. And some of the NATO countries would sort of applaud that the United States on their own, without telling them, had decided to put up a U2 and go over and get those pictures and so on. They decided then that instead of having a US director for one of their laboratories, it might be a good idea to have a European.
MR. LARSON: Oh, yes.
DR. SEAMANS: So anyways, I did not get the job.
MR. LARSON: The U2 incident changed your career somewhat then.
DR. SEAMANS: Maybe they were just being polite to me; maybe there were other reasons why I didn’t get it. But I was sitting in my office in June, this is now the June of 1960, when I got a call from Keith Lennon who was the administrator of NASA and I had never met him, but of course I had followed NASA and I was very interested in what was going on in the space area, and I as I mentioned earlier, we had one project at RCA and I guess I should of also mentioned I had been on the NACA Committee for Stability and Control ever since 1948 and had been one of those that argued strenuously that you didn’t have to stabilize airplanes just by using the air particles going by outside, that you could do something internal that would be helpful. Then when NASA was formed they set up some special advisory committees at the Hague to advise a new organization as NACA was transformed into NASA, what might be done in the space area in the controls and so on. I knew some of the people in NASA at the time, including Hub Drabner, whom I respected very much. So anyway I got the call from Keith Lennon, and he said, “Dr. Seamans, this is Keith Lennon and I just wondered if you were going to be down here in Washington anytime soon?” I gave him a truthful answer and I started by saying, “No, I wasn’t planning to.” But I was about to say, “But I would be happy to come down if you want to see me.” When he, he was a very direct person, you probably knew him actually.
MR. LARSON: Oh, yes. I knew him as a commissioner back in ’52.
DR. SEAMANS: He went to Yale and I kidded him that he reminded me of an old bulldog. But anyway he said, “Would you have dinner with me at the old Statler?” I said, “Of course.” So I arrive at the Statler and we went in and I had an Old Fashioned, had dinner and he just pulled out an organization chart right out of his pocket and without further ado. He said, “I’ve discussed this with Hub Drabner and we want you to come down and be the associate administrator of NASA.” He said, “You probably don’t know what that means, so here is this chart and your job is right there,” and he put his thumb down right on the chart and he said, “This is the job that Dick Horner now has and Dick is leaving. He agreed to take the job for one year, but now he wants to go back in the private life. So we would like you to come down and be what I would call a General Manager for NASA.” So we discussed it, of course I chewed it over with a lot of adrenaline pumping all the way home and discussed it with Jean and we finally decided it would be a pretty darn exciting thing to do. So almost before I knew it, I was down there on September 1, being sworn in by Keith as the Associate Administrator. Then came the process, of course thanks to Keith, of spending a whole month going around and visiting each one of the laboratories, which included not only the old NACA labs and centers, but also Wernher Von Braun’s Huntsville Operations and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Goddard lab which grew out of a naval research lab. Sometime after that, I guess it was probably in about October; we had a retreat down in Williamsburg with about 70 of the senior NASA people. He said, “I think it would be good if you just stood up and for about a half an hour gave everybody at this retreat, well call it impressions of a new Associate administrator.” I really agonized over this, what’s important, what have I seen in these five or six weeks that might be significant, what might be helpful, but just for fun to begin with, I said, “You know, one of the things that has really struck me about NASA is it’s formality.” I said, “You all know I use to be at RCA and there we made a fetish of calling people by first name or nicknames.” I said, “There was a senior vice President and we called him Pinky.” I said, “It’s hard for me to do it, but I finally did. Now I find down here its Doctor this and Doctor this and mister this,” and I made it clear that I sort of preferred first names. Well afterwards, nobody paid any attention to anything else I said, there was a cocktail party and Eberhard Rees came up to me and he had worked with Wernher Von Braun at Peenemunde and he as the man that really made things work with the V2 and everything. Wernher was a salesman, and he was a good technical person too, but Eberhard came up to me and he said, “Bob,” he said, “I want you to know just last week, Wernher said I could call Wernher.” I said I can’t believe it, Eberhard. I mean you’ve been working with him for 20 years and you’ve been calling him Dr. Von Braun.” He said, “Oh no, he’s Dr. Von Braun.” (laughter)
MR. LARSON: That is the ultimate German formality, right?
DR. SEAMANS: Yeah. So of course, it wasn’t too long after that there was an election and a new President coming in by the name of John F. Kennedy. I wasn’t at all sure whether the next administration I would be around or not. But during the interregnum between the election and the swearing in, there was quite a bit of time to sort of review the where we were going in NASA. I had gone to an Eisenhower cabinet meeting when Keith had described the space program plans and when George Kristiakowsky described a…
[Break in video]
MR. LARSON: Alright fine. You were in the middle of describing some of the vital decisions of confronting NASA at the time.
DR. SEAMANS: Ok, I mentioned that Jim Webb was made the Administrator and it was a remarkable fortuitous choice, I might say. And he agreed to come on the basis that Dr. Driden would stay as a deputy, but there was no decision I realized as to who was going to be the Associate Administrator. So I was asked into his room, into his office, and he asked me a lot of questions that had very little to do with the space program, they were such questions as: what do I think of the organization of Sears-Roebuck and the way they did their business? Fortunately when I was at RCA I had taken a management course and knew a little bit about the subject. So I could compare them with the organizations of Montgomery Ward and after about an hour of this kind of discussion, he said, “Well perhaps we should go out and get a little lunch.” He said, “Where would you like to go for lunch?” I said, “Well Mr. Webb, you know Washington better than I do. Why don’t you make the selection?” And he said, “How about the National Democratic Club?” I said, “I don’t know.” I said, “I better fess up to the issue. Do they accept republicans in there?” And during the lunch he sort of seemed aware of this and a little bit concerned about it. He said, “This isn’t too bad a lunch.” And I said, “No, it’s not too bad,” but after that I found he was very pleased with the fact that we had a bipartisan organization and when I would appear at a podium with him, he always made a point of saying, “I’m a democrat and Bob Seaman here is a republican.” But the question, we were late getting at it because I think five or six weeks had gone by into the Kennedy Administration and we were late at reviewing our budget which is a custom when the President comes in, to review the budget of the previous administration. So we had our meeting with Dave Bell, who was the Director of the Budget and our OMB and we went in and essentially recommended what we recommended to Eisenhower, that we should precede with a Saturn vehicle and with the Apollo project. And Dave Bell said, “Well I’m sure that the President is not ready to make a decision such as this. This is going to take a lot of time to think over and we will consider this in connection with next year’s budget.” But we insisted that this be at least considered by the President and so we had a meeting with him and it was Hugh Driden, Mr. Webb and myself, Glenn Seaborg was there as well because there was a question of a nuclear rocket and I remember Jerry Wiesner and Mack Bundy and I guess the Vice President was there and the President. We had what I thought was a very good discussion of these pros and cons. President Kennedy and I were classmates at Harvard although I must say I didn’t know him very well. It was duly noted that he did not recognize me at the meeting. (Laughter) In any event, he did elect to put in some additional funds for a launch vehicle, but he was no way ready to accept the Apollo program which would have been the next step beyond Mercury and might have then lead to a circum-lunar or lunar landing. But it wasn’t very long after that that a gentleman named Gagarin went into orbit and at that point President Kennedy became very much aware of some of the pitfalls of having the Soviet Union do these things unexpectedly and then explain later why they were so far ahead of us. So he turned to the Vice President who was by then formally made the Chairman of the Space Council and said, “What do we do?” The Vice President had a way of gathering people together to get a consensus, but at least in this case it didn’t lead to any solution. So finally in desperation he turned to Bob McNamara and Jim Webb and said, “Look, you two people,” McNamara was Secretary of Defense and Jim Webb as Head of NASA, “must have the best information available as to what we can and cannot do and what might really make sense.” He said, “I want your report in 10 days.” It turned out that the meeting to discuss this matter occurred on a Saturday morning, the day after Shepard went into suborbital flight. There was a big question whether to let Alan by or not. There was great concern in the White House that if he failed on something that wasn’t even as much as what Gagarin had done we would really look sick in the eyes of the world and incompetent and so on. Finally we made the argument supposing he’s successful, don’t you think that would be quite positive? And it was agreed that yes he would be allowed to go and even by Saturday morning we knew that it had a tremendous effect on Europe that people had watched it on television and they felt that they were sort of a part of it, and so the first discussion was whether to have an open program or not, whether to continue an open program. It was agreed that yes, it had to be an open program. It was also then meant that we had to name our goal and the Russians would know it, but they didn’t have to reveal what they were doing, and so we were playing a game of poker, but our cards were down on the table. Our recommendation was that we ought to go for a lunar landing. We did stand a reasonable chance of getting there before the Soviet Union could get there because a great deal remained to be done, but they did not have in hand all of the boosters and equipment that would be required. Bob McNamara was skeptical. He wasn’t sure about that they couldn’t do it already and possibly the goal should be taking men to the planets. I was horror stricken at that thought.
MR. LARSON: That’s a large magnitude more difficult.
DR. SEAMANS: That’s about a year’s flight, we weren’t sure if human beings could stand it, being weightless and all that. We didn’t know much about the planets.
MR. LARSON: Or the physiology of the individuals.
DR. SEAMANS: Exactly, as well as the psychology. So anyway, the decision was made that, yes, we would recommend that that be the goal. There was a lot of other detail recommendations that were made that had to do with defense as well as some of the NASA unmanned programs. Worked all weekend writing the report. Jim Webb came over at midnight Sunday night and worked all day for the plans for Alan Shepard’s triumphant return to Washington and addressing Congress. Read the whole thing over that I had been working on with John Rugal. The next morning it was signed by McNamara and Jim Webb and was transmitted to the Vice President and at the luncheon at the State Department that was hosted by the Vice president, he actually had in a manila envelope this report, which he then took over to the President and then he left for southeast Asia, his first trip to southeast Asia. Sort of a historic moment in many ways. And of course then began the job of putting it all together. Were we going to hire a lot more people in NASA or are we going to hire contractors? Are we going to need additional centers and where were the centers going to be located and how are we going to work with the Air Force and could we get the Corps of Engineers as we did to put up all the new structures that would be required. A very large number of decisions that had to be made. I guess the most interesting one, certainly from a technical standpoint, was what mode of operation to use. The commonly excepted mode was build a great big pile of rocket stages and so on and all the vehicles for the humans up in the nose and go to the moon and when you get there have enough that you can shoot back to earth and that you have the right reentry capsule to come into the atmosphere.
MR. LARSON: That was a very interesting problem as I remember it. I am very interested to see what your story is as to how you arrived at the decision as you went. That was a very much of a controversial thing.
DR. SEAMANS: It was very controversial and this method called direct descent method was what the German people naturally expected to do. This is what Wernher and his people were prepared to build all those great big rockets. Another possible approach which was considered very seriously at the start was to use a somewhat smaller booster to put a lot of elements in orbit around the earth and bring them all together and then sort or reassemble in earth orbit what would be required to then do exactly the same thing to leave earth orbit to go to the moon and then have enough on the surface of the moon that you could then come back directly to the earth. So these two approaches the direct ascent and the earth orbit rendezvous were the two avenues that were followed almost exclusively for the first year. For example the land acquisition down at the Cape, we finally decided after examining 5 possible sites, Pacific sites as well as Atlantic sites to enlarge the operation at the Cape and make use of the Air Force that was there already, but we acquired Merritt Island which is 87,000 acres on this island which was primarily orange groves so that we could not only build the Saturn booster which would be required for the earth orbit rendezvous, but build something called Nova, which was at least twice as large that would be up in the northern part of Merritt Island, parenthetically it should be noted that this is what the Russians chose to do to build a very large vehicle. But they never were successful in launching. They tried twice and both times it exploded either on the pad or at a very low altitude. Anyway, during my first month in NASA and touring around at different centers, I had met somebody named John Hubert, and he as a young engineering scientist at the Langley field who had a team of five people and they were examining various ways of going to the moon and returning. They had come up with a scheme where you would go to orbit directly around the moon but then you would break off a vehicle and go and land on the moon leaving all of the heavy earth reentry equipment in orbit around the moon and then when you took off you rendezvous and dock with it in lunar orbit and then use the heavy equipment to come back. This meant that you didn’t have to decelerate and then accelerate again this very high mass capsule which talking about on the moon is roughly about 4,000 feet per second at first deceleration and then acceleration takes a lot of fuel. He felt that this would be a much more economical way from an energy standpoint of going to the moon. Well after we were all established and we had Holms left RCA to come down and head this project and he had Wernher Von Braun and Kurt Debus and all these people charging ahead, contractors like North America, Nobel Telephone labs, everybody roaring down on these two approaches of direct ascent or earth orbit rendezvous, I started getting letters from John Hubert. He said, “As the general manager of NASA I would think you would be deeply concerned about the approaches that are being followed. Don’t you feel that you have some responsibility to enter into the decision as to which way to be going?” These letters were quite abrasive letters. I’d read these letters and here was this young guy down there at Langley field and I think, of course I should tear it up just throw it away and forget about it and call up Bob Gilruth on the phone who’s the director of the lab and tell him to get this guy off my back, who’s a pain in the neck, but then I did remember the discussion and also from my experience at RCA with the satellite interceptor realized that that intercept problem really isn’t that difficult. That was what everybody was concerned about. If you fail to rendezvous and dock in lunar orbit, you have bought the farm. You’re not coming back home. You can imagine how catastrophic that could be to astronaut families and world opinion and the whole bit leaving these poor guys to eventually run out of oxygen and orbit around the moon for the rest of eternity. So what I actually did do each time, I got a series of letters, I can’t exactly tell you how many, 3 or 4. I called Bernard Holms on the phone and told him about this idea. Or perhaps I had lunch with him. But I gave him a letter and told him to consider this possibility because it does have some attractive features. After about 6 months, well to begin with he kept saying it’s an interesting idea, but we’re going the other direction, but about 6 months later, one day I was having lunch with Holms and discussing the Apollo program, he said, “You know,” he said, “quite a few in our group are beginning to think that’s the way to go.” He said, “It has another very attractive feature that you can design the vehicle to go down to the lunar surface and come back into orbit, just for that purpose. It can be very different from anything you could possibly use in the atmosphere.” It can have long arms and be very flexible it can have a large window in it so you can look down and see the lunar surface as you come in, we can make it very, very flexible in this operation just for working around the moon. So as soon as it appeared that that might be the way to go, I advised Hugh Driden and Jim Webb that this was beginning to be an attractive idea. I met with them very frequently and tried to keep them up to date. But they could see some of the pitfalls in doing this, but everybody expected us to do something different, a big change like that is bound to come under all kinds of scrutiny by Congress and the White House and so on and sure enough it did. Jerry Wiesner had several people working for him, Jerry Wiesner being Kennedy Science advisor.
MR. LARSON: Oh, yes, I remember.
DR. SEAMANS: At that time, one of them being a person named Nick Gallavan who worked for NASA for a few years, had not been highly regarded because he believed very strenuously in making reliability calculations where you take into account every single part of the rocket for example and then you figure what’s the likelihood of all the parts to work and then sum it all up depending on how it’s all interconnected and then you say, “Gosh, we’ve only got a 10 per cent chance of this thing succeeding.” Well, he proceeded to run an analysis like this on our lunar orbit rendezvous. He felt that the chances of losing astronauts were going to be too high and we ended up with some very difficult negotiations. I call them negotiations really. The most exciting one was when we were showing the President and the Vice President what we were doing first at Huntsville, then at the Cape and then down in Houston, and we were right in the middle of the large assembly area at Huntsville, the President, the Vice President, Bob McNamara, I think Tony Croft, Administer of Defense from Great Britain, Jerry Wiesner and a couple of other people when President Kennedy turned to Jim Webb and said, “I understand you and Jerry don’t see quite eye to eye on how we’re going to the moon.” And we’re in this central part of this great big area and around the outside were all these employees of Huntsville and all the correspondents. All of a sudden we were right there, right in the goldfish bowl arguing about this whole matter, which is what Kennedy enjoyed doing. So we had it out right there. No decision was reached, but Kennedy said, “I want to be kept fully informed of this,” and we could not reach an accommodation with Jerry’s people and so on. And there was finally the day, and I wasn’t there for this one, but from what I understand happened. Jim Webb went over to see the President and said, “Mr. President, you have to decide. You want me to run the project or do you want to have your science advisor?” So it was decided that we would go lunar orbit rendezvous, which proved to be successful.
MR. LARSON: Essentially afterwards, it’s very obvious it was the right way to go, but wasn’t at the time.
DR. SEAMANS: So that was a very, very instructive series of negotiations, studies first, it sort of bore out the fact that you get to keep your antenna open for ideas as you proceed, but you got to use some of your gut feeling or experience if you want to call it that, and you’ve got to lean every now and then to get the machinery to go in the right direction.
MR. LARSON: Well, this is a very interesting story. I remember the controversy of course, but I didn’t know of the origin of the idea. I am delighted that you were able to bring out the circumstances. It’s a very interesting part of history.
DR. SEAMANS: Well, John Hughbald deserves a lot of credit, he really does. Abrasive as he was, he happened to be right. Perhaps I’ve over emphasized the abrasiveness, but he was insistent, no question about that.
MR. LARSON: And dedicated.
DR. SEAMANS: Yeah. Well, perhaps to wrap up NASA, there was a very tough time that we had. It started an afternoon when a large number of people were over at a signing ceremony over at the White House, having to do with space. This was a protocol that was signed by both the Russians and ourselves. Jim Webb used it as an occasion to bring in some of our contractors and give them the opportunity to be at the White House for this occasion and meet with the President. Johnson was the President by then. I was the deputy administrator, Driden had passed away in the interim, and there was going to be a dinner that night before the contractors, but I was having some people at our house including, Dr. Draper and so on. So I went home and I walked in the door and the phone was ringing. It was George Low on the phone from Houston and he said, “They’re gone.” I said, “What do you mean they’re gone?” He said, “Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee are dead. We were running a test on Apollo down at the Cape and we had a fire in the capsule.”
MR. LARSON: I remember that. Devastating.
DR. SEAMANS: That was a devastating event for a great number of people in NASA and it turned out to be devastating on a national basis because people identified with these astronauts. People felt that they almost knew them personally. There were all kinds of investigations and so on. What we did that night of course was to inform everybody, the President. I was talking to the Vice President, actually I went directly to my office, so I could make the calls and Jean wasn’t to tell the guests coming to our house what I was doing, and so they didn’t know until the evening was over. So I started making phone calls. I guess I wasn’t talking to the Vice President, I was talking to McNamara and his office had called to see if the news was true. I said it was. Just as I was talking to him, the operator cut in and said this is an emergency call. So I talked, the emergency was Peter Hackes of NBC telling me that I had to come right over to the NBC studio to explain to the country what was going on. I don’t think I’ve ever been more upset at anybody than I was at Peter Hackes...
MRS. LARSON: Oh my goodness.
DR. SEAMANS: ...for feeling that was where my responsibilities lay.
MR. LARSON: Yes, some of these media people feel that they are the ones that are running…
DR. SEAMANS: That was the last thing that I wanted to do. We arranged that night that we would have a review board. Dr. Tommy Thompson of Langley would head ti. He was very highly respected. The next morning at the crack of dawn I got in the NASA plane, picked him up, went down to the Cape and established the review board. We impounded all of the equipment and everything already. Before they were through, we had a team of about 5,000 people investigating what had happened. Fire experts, we brought in people from the Air Force who had this kind of experience, people from the office of [inaudible] and so on. From the Department of Interior. One of the problems was keeping an umbrella over the investigation so they could come up without sort of explaining what they were doing each day with their findings and recommendations. At the same time we had to keep the President and the Congress and the media informed to some extent about what was going on. The way that was done was for me to go down once a week to the Cape, review with the team that we put together, where they stood, and then on the way back in the airplane, I’d write a report which I then submit to Jim Webb. He would then take it over to the President and then take it up the committees of Congress and then it would be released. These are my ideas and it still left the Committee of the Review Board free to their own recommendations. That was a pretty intense period of time.
MR. LARSON: Oh, yes. That must have been a terrible period to live through.
DR. SEAMANS: There were a lot of very sad personal situations that grew out of it, not the least of course the families of the astronauts. We got through all that. That occurred in February and by the following summer, end of the summer, we had things pretty well back on course. We had to redesign the capsule, leaving out all cloth for example. We, everybody asked the question, “What went wrong? How could this possibly happen?” There isn’t a very good answer to that, except that we tried to test everything. The rocket motors on the stand, we’d shake everything. We’d expose everything to the shock of take-off. One thing we never did was to actually start a fire in a capsule with 100 per cent oxygen. We tested all the equipment that went in for fire. We took all the cloth that we used and we’d light it in a vacuum and see, well light it in 100 percent oxygen and see how it burned, but we had never in an enclosed capsule with 100 per cent oxygen at 14.7 psi, struck a match. We realized that was a deficiency in our test program and we did do that afterwards and we found there was absolutely no way you could extinguish a fire once it started.
MR. LARSON: Yes, I have experienced that administration at Oak Ridge. We had a chamber that had oxygen and we almost had a similar thing unfortunately, not fatal, but it is devastating and unusual, very unexpected.
DR. SEAMANS: The reason we did it was because we did not want to have a two gas system. It would be much simpler just to have pure oxygen and as soon as we were in space we would bleed off the oxygen. Get it down to the equivalent of a partial pressure of oxygen in the atmosphere and it was all at individual need. They don’t need the nitrogen in the air. The solution was really very simple. The solution was that we would start off with atmospheric pressure in the normal area if you will, but we would not recirculate the nitrogen. There was enough leakage in the system that after about an hour you’d have nothing in there but the pressure of the oxygen around 3 and a half, 4 psi. But, as I said, there was a redesign; we had all new material for the astronaut suits and so on. About that time, this is 7 and a half years after arriving at Washington, I only intended to stay about 2. I submitted my resignation to Jim Webb and went back to MIT. I went back; they were nice enough to invite me back as a Hunsaker professor in aeronautical engineering. The only duty I had in the first year as a Hunsaker professor was to deliver one lecture which was called the Merimarten lecture.
MR. LARSON: You didn’t have too much of an academic load then.
DR. SEAMANS: No, that was great fun. Jerry Hunsaker was still coming into his office. He was 84 years old and since I was the Hunsaker professor, he felt quite free to ask me questions whenever he wanted and he asked me some great questions. I had a lot of fun that first year even though in the spring I was going up there to MIT while my family was down here. We got a house up there and in the fall everything was just fine, that following fall. My family and I were up there, we were in a house that we are remodeling. Along about the middle of December, I guess it was, I got a call from somebody named Mel[vin] Laird. I had never met him, but I knew who he was. He was going to be the new Secretary of Defense. He said, “Bob, any chance you’re going to be down in Washington in the next few years?”
MR. LARSON: Sounds like a familiar story.
DR. SEAMANS: Well it turned out this time, I was going to be, because the next day I was going to be in Washington, I was going to fly down to see the launching of the Apollo, Apollo 8 that was going to fly Frank Borman and company around the moon. I was going down to the Cape and I told him that. He said, “Well would you have lunch with me?” And I said, “I certainly would.” He had a room in a hotel there in the middle of Washington which in the room he had all the organization charts of the Department of Defense around the wall. A fellow named Bill Berudy was sort of his executive officer, who’d worked with him up on the hill. Bill was there, Mel Laird wasn’t. I found out this is one of Mel’s habits. He’s not always absolutely on time. But finally he came in and was apologetic for being late. We had, right in the middle of this rather large room, had a table set for two and Bill Brady left, and all during the meal we talked about technical people. He asked me about what I thought of people like Johnny Foster and Al Fletch. I did my best to indicate, to give him my own appraisal of their capabilities. Then all of a sudden he said, “Well, I want you to know now why I’ve invited you to be here. I’d like you to come down and be the Secretary of the Air Force.” I was absolutely stunned. I never even dreamed that was going to happen. I thought there might be some technical job he’d like me to have. So I gave him 19 reasons why that was a very poor idea. And the, he explained what he wanted to have for his three service secretaries. One holdover, he was going to ask Stan[ley] Resor to continue to be the Secretary of the Army. He wanted to have one political person and he said that was going to be, he hoped, John Chafee, who had been the governor of Rhode Island for I think four terms and he wanted to have one technical person and he said he discussed this with a lot of people and they all felt that I was up to it. I didn’t, he finally got me to say that I wouldn’t turn it down right there in the room, that I’d go back and discuss it. So after going down to Florida for the launching, I went back home to discuss it with Jean, my wife who at that time was not very well. So we ended up with some of the discussion in her hospital bedroom. I also was very concerned by then about what my children, what the reaction might be because Vietnam was already not the most popular war that we had ever had and I discussed it with each one of our children individually, our four oldest at least. I explained it to them one by one, and every one of them said that I ought to do it. It wasn’t that they favored the war effort; they preferred to see me in a job than some other people couldn’t think of.
MR. LARSON: Oh yeah.
DR. SEAMANS: So anyway it did turn out that I accepted. But I did beg for some additional time. I got an extra four weeks of time, so that I could finish my work at MIT and deliver this lecture, which I actually delivered after I became Secretary of the Air Force. I called, Howard Johnson was President of MIT and I went over to see him immediately after I got back and Howard said, “You know, Bob, when the President asks you to do something, you got to have an awfully good reason for turning it down.” So I said, “Well, if I except, do you think I still need to give the Merimarten lecture?” He said, “I’ll be very disappointed if you don’t.” He did not let me off the hook. But anyway we were involved with the Air Force for four and a third years. There were some exciting things needless to say. One memorable event talking about space as we have was something called the Manned Orbital Laboratory. The Air Force was going to make use of the Jimenez NASA capsule to have a laboratory in space to try out various ideas for recognizance and so on. This had been a program that had been going on, but had been going on rather slowly. One of the first things I was asked when I was sworn in was to investigate the man orbital laboratory and I knew that there was quite a bit of talk about cancelling it. Well after looking it over I came back with a recommendation. I said, no it ought to be accelerated. If you’re going to have a project like this, you’ve only got so much time when you can have continued support for it. Also if you let things drag on, the total costs, you have to carry a lot of extra costs. The way to do these jobs is to set the goal tight and then go and do it. So that was my recommendation. I could, kept getting this feedback from various people that probably the Manned Orbital Laboratory was going to be cancelled. I thought that would be really terrible to come in and be Secretary of the Air Force and the first thing that gets cancelled is a space project and that’s what my recent experience has been. So I talked to Mr. Laird about it. He allowed me to come in one day a week with an agenda of anything I wanted to discuss for about an hour with him and Mr. Packard, Dave Packard. I’d bring along John McLucas who was my deputy and at one of these meetings I said I knew that this was being considered for cancellation, but I would like the privilege before the final decision was made of discussing it with the President. I felt it was of that importance. So I got one Saturday morning from Mel Laird and he said we have an appointment with the President this afternoon at 3 o’clock to discuss the Manned Orbital Laboratory.
MR. LARSON: He didn’t give you much time for preparation.
DR. SEAMANS: I had done a little bit of work ahead so I had some, a few overhead photographs and things of that sort, so I could talk about various resolutions from various altitudes and the importance of resolution and importance of knowing what was going on around the world, looking at different armaments. So anyway we had the meeting in the Oval Room. As we went in I could see outside I guess it was in the Rose Garden sort of a band of people leaning on their instruments and a podium and obviously there was some great ceremony about to take place. Turns out some Head of State was about to arrive. And the President was at his desk with a yellow pad, Kissinger was there. I took along General Stewart who was in charge of the project, and Mr. Laird. So I started through with the charts and the President kept writing and writing and writing and pretty soon somebody stuck their head in the door and said the ceremony starts in five minutes. The President asked a couple of questions and I kept talking and finally in effect Mr. Laird picked me up by the scruff of the neck and led my out of the room and on Monday I got a call from Kissinger who was the Security Advisor to the President at that time, and in his German accent he said it was a very, very fine presentation. Very, very fine, and on Tuesday I found out it had been canceled.
MR. LARSON: Well these are momentous decisions that come very fast.
DR. SEAMANS: I might just say one thing about the technical endeavor of the Air Force. I won’t take you through all of the projects and the trials and tribulations. I sort of developed a philosophy of how projects, large projects need to be reviewed and it’s my feeling that they have to be reviewed on a periodic basis if you’re really going to know what’s going on. One reading of a project doesn’t tell you very much, it’s what tells you over time is what tells you what is going on. I found that there already was what they called a Secretary’s Weapons Review over in a conference room that I fell heir to. I said, “Let’s go through it just the way you’ve always done it. I’d like to see what the process is.” This was about two weeks after I had joined the Air Force. So I go to walk in the door and there’s a colonel standing there and he flicks his heel like this and sort of salutes and says, “The Secretary of the Air Force,” and everybody jumps up and stands at stiff attention and I sit down at the end of the table and they start going through these slides very fast. After about 20 minutes of this, I said hold it. I like to know how many levels of the Air Force organization hierarchy have reviewed these charts before they came in here. There was sort of a long pause and people started talking and leaning over and talking to each other. Finally General McDonald who was the Chief of Staff of the Air Force said, “Probably about 18.” I said, “Well, I don’t need to spend any more time in here today,” and walked out. I said that henceforth instead of having this review once every three months we’re going to have it once every month and that the person in charge, the Project Manager, where ever he or she was located were going to come in at least once every three months. This was the colonel at right field or whoever it was. There was no point in going through all these middle men. The other times when these reviews were held, somebody should be designated in headquarters who would be the liaison person. It wasn’t fair for people to come from California once a month for this review. This would be the person who had talked to the project person the day before and would come in with how the project stood. So we followed 16 projects. There were only so many projects you could follow in that detail, but I found for example on cost control, the cost obviously at times run out because people don’t do their jobs as well as they should, but often times the colonel at right field who’s building a tactical airplane will be visited by the four star general who’s in charge of the tactical air command will want to review the project and will find that this, that, and the other thing will not be included on this new airplane, would be appalled that this won’t have this, that, and the other thing, would order this colonel, if he knew what was good for him, to insert that into the program.
MR. LARSON: Oh yeah.
DR. SEAMANS: And so the colonel could be in a very tough spot. But by having the colonel come in and when these kind of possibilities come up we had the general in charge of tactical air command in the room and we’d have the project person and the chief of staff of the Air Force and the deputy chiefs of staff in charge of R and D and so on and we’d have the assistant secretaries and we’d present the pros and cons that way rather than having it result from the colonel being leaned on with a very unfair advantage of four ranks against him. So we started in that period of time, the B-1 bomber which is now come back to life, the F-15 fighter, a tactical fighter, the so called A-10, the A-wax airplane was started during that period, an early warning airplane. We got out of the woods on the F-111 which had received quite a bit of notoriety as a TFX the previous 10 years. We had the problems of the C-5 airplane to contend with.
MR. LARSON: You were there at a period of real controversy.
DR. SEAMANS: I found there was somebody in the Air Force named Ernie Fitzgerald that I, who was very much admired by a Senator Proxmire.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. SEAMANS: I received letters even before I joined the Air Force about what a wonderful public servant we had in Ernest Fitzgerald and he was sure I would make good use of him. It fell on my lap to fire him. Just as I was leaving the Air Force after four years, there was an open civil service hearing which had never been done before, which he insisted on. So with the press present and without, I was not allowed to have council because a civil service hearing they try to get the views of all the individuals. So I was there as an individual.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. SEAMANS: But Ernie had his lawyers and as a result of that hearing, he was reinstated and he got all his back pay and he ended up suing me and several others for $3 million and the case was only resolved in my favor, I think, about a year and a half ago.
MR. LARSON: I’ll be darned. That’s an amazing story there. One individual can stir up so much controversy.
DR. SEAMANS: But I got myself in a book that he wrote when he wasn’t working for the Air Force that was called The High Priests of Waste. I’m the star villain.
MR. LARSON: On many of these things, accomplishment is almost forgotten to review trivialities on this thing. It’s very disturbing.
DR. SEAMANS: Just about this time, let’s see, Nixon was reelected and Mel Laird only said he would stay for one term. Elliot Richardson came in as the Secretary of Defense. As a matter of fact I got a call from him when I was in Anchorage, when I was about to leave for Antarctica with Guy Stever. I thought gosh he’s going to call me back to the United States, but no. I explained what I was going to do and he said, “No, you better take your trip but see me as soon as you get back, which was in December. So we flew down to Christ’s Church and went down to Antarctica which was a very interesting trip. It was the most interesting trip I’ve had in my life. We went down with a couple of Russians from Vastak to the South Pole and put some new rivets in a shelter down there and so on. But then when I got back and talked to Elliot I was very impressed with the way he was taking over that responsibility. I explained to him that I really wanted to get out of the Air Force. I had been there for four years and I thought that was long enough. The average was 1.8 years for a Secretary of the Air Force. By the time I got out, I was there longer than anybody, excepting Gene Zukor, who was there for five years.
MR. LARSON: I saw Gene the other day.
DR. SEAMANS: Did you really? But the last week that I was there, things were starting to come unraveled a little bit with [John] Ehrlichman and [Harry Robbins, Bob, H.R.] Haldeman and all of those kinds of things. We had morning sessions, every Monday morning there was the, what was it called? The Secretaries Conference and at 9:30 in the morning and the Joint Chiefs and the service secretaries sat around a table with the Secretary and the deputy Secretary and around the outside of the room were all the assistant secretaries of defense and it was sort of a normal routine we went through with different people reviewing different things that were going on. But this time, Elliot started off and he said, “I have something to report to you and I’m discussing it with you with a heavy heart.” He said, “I was at Camp David last night and the President asked me to be the Attorney General.” He said, “So I’ll be leaving here the end of this week.” So actually the time I left he was already being consumed with the problem he was really going to get into as Attorney General. [James] Schlesinger hadn’t been named as the new Secretary of Defense. And so I ended up leaving the Pentagon. I had written a letter and so on, but I had never gotten a response. I went over and became the President of the Academy of Engineering and the first thing I did was issue a news release saying in effect that Bob Seaman’s is no longer at the Pentagon. He’s over here at the Academy.
MR. LARSON: Fine. At that particular point should we just pause for a moment?
DR. SEAMANS: Sure.
MR. LARSON: Fine.
[End of Interview]